You Have the Attention Span of Your Social Media

We used to take the time to stop to smell the roses, but not anymore – thanks in part to those 140 character limits in Twitter.

Twitter isn't the only social media network cutting into our already quick-paced attention spans. 

The constant flow of status updates on all the social media sites we plug into is as well.

And the 15-year-old wonder kid programmers coding these social networks are well aware of this – in fact they are encouraging it by making our social media experiences more visual than textual.

Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter all recently updated their web and mobile layouts and user interfaces to make them more graphical.

When you scroll through your Facebook timeline, you’ll be dazzled by the bright images your friends posted. Google Plus places a huge emphasis on images – they appear larger and bolder than the text descriptions on both the web and mobile versions of all posts. And Twitter recently added the ability to attach photos to tweets.

Recently Tumblr released a new app – Photoset – which takes various images you provide, and creates a cool image by combining them into a frameset. This “photoset” frame can be uploaded to Tumblr – naturally – or shared via other social networks using the Photoset website. The primary Tumblr app also got a bit of a makeover, improving it’s graphical user interface too.

And who could forget all the hype when social network giant Facebook bought social photo sharing network giant Instagram?

Although the popularity of the very visual Pinterest may be part of the reason behind these social network changes, there is more psychology here than you realize.

Scientists studying our attention spans first realized they were declining in the 1980’s, as the first video game consoles were breaking into the ever increasingly distracted world.

Television further eroded the amount of time it takes before we get bored, when the first specialty channels started appearing on the dial around the 1980's also.

In the 1950’s, the standard TV commercial ran 60 seconds, by the 1980’s that standard length was cut in half to 30 seconds. By the 1990’s your fifteen minutes of fame really was 15 seconds, as that was the average standard commercial length on TV. 

Today, the average broadcast TV commercial runs between five to 10 seconds! And you’ll notice ads shown at the start of a commercial break are repeated at the end of the same commercial break, because our attention spans are so short, we may have forgotten it within the average two-minute “pack” of commercials!

The biggest killer to our already faltering attention – the Internet, arrived in homes in the mid 1990’s, as our attention spans were already pushed to practically non-existent. 

Although this was long before the social networks of Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and the rest even were conceived, the ability to search for whatever you could think of dazzled us to the point of just wanting to search for the heck of it.

When social networking sites did capture our already frazzled attention, surprisingly our attention spans increased slightly – at least online. We were fascinated with the ability to check out former high school sweethearts, and see who aged worse.

But as social networking became the norm, and mobile devices made it possible to check in on these social networks wherever and whenever we wanted, our attention spans declined again.

By the time you have read this sentence, your mind already is thinking of something else.

That’s our attention span of today – as you concentrate on the task at hand, you’re already thinking of the next thing. The average North American’s attention span is only about three-seconds today.

It takes less than a second for our brains to process images, but twice that long for us to parse a sentence.

That’s why all the social networks are becoming more visually appealing – they are feeding off of our degraded attention spans.

And it is a degradation – because there is something to be said for taking the time to smell the roses.