Why the world is wrong about attention spans today

You may have heard, your attention span is abysmally short these days. It would appear that it is remarkable that you have reached the second sentence of this column.

- MANU JOSEPH

You were not always this way, they say, yet this is one of your defining qualities today. In fact, nobody is sure what exactly is modern about you except your attention span. The world is in a tizzy about your new incapacity to focus. Entire industries are wondering how to deliver their products to you in that fleeting time when you are attentive. And they are going terribly wrong, because your attention span is not the problem.

A few days ago, I saw a headline in the UK's Times that paraphrased the Scottish writer Ian Rankin, one of the most popular writers on earth, as saying, "We authors should write for modern attention spans." In January this year, an article in The Guardian asked whether Netflix was "deliberately dumbing down TV so people can watch while scrolling." The broad point being made was obvious to anyone who has watched TV recently—plot-lines and dialogues are simple and stuff is repeated in case you get distracted. Educators are breaking lectures into shorter segments as though students of the past had ascetic focus. They even have a name for it: 'brain breaks.' The average TED talk, too, is shorter today, and a report says Spotify music samples are shorter than before. All this is because of your rumoured attention span.

Yet, I do not believe it is true that attention spans have changed significantly over the decades. People's minds have always wandered. They have always struggled to focus. And most of them couldn't bear to spend too much time with their own minds.