Wednesday, May 02, 2007

How do you measure numb?

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