There are two articles that I came across this morning that addressed the issue of our "Short attention spans", the title of this essay came from one of them...
There are a number of interesting anecdotes in both the articles that I have summarized below:
From: Attention Deficit
- How do you measure numb?
- Clutter is media-agnostic.
- The digital age is what, two years old, and already we're all cyber casualties.
- Too overwhelmed to move.
- Too tired to care.
- Buried in choices and driven by technology, we consume media like butterflies, flitting from one communication channel to the next and remembering less of it every jacked-in minute. And it never stops.
From - Our Abbreviated Attention Span
- Imagine if this summer's biggest moneymaker turns out to be a 13-minute video on iTunes.
- Now everything from the blockbuster to a 2-minute video on YouTube is content.
- it's all content, regardless of venue or length. The only real differences separating these types of content are their modes of distribution and the associated revenue models.
- short clips can't be attributed to YouTube, iPods or even the Web
- the fragmented, multitasking lives of Gen Y and, frankly, most of us, which makes the short form so appealing
