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From EurekAlert
The negative effects of social media and a hectic news cycle on our attention span has been an on-going discussion in recent years--but there's been a lack of empirical data supporting claims of a 'social acceleration'. A new study in Nature Communications finds that our collective attention span is indeed narrowing, and that this effect occurs - not only on social media - but also across diverse domains including books, web searches, movie popularity, and more.
Our public discussion can appear to be increasingly fragmented and accelerated. Sociologists, psychologists, and teachers have warned of an emerging crisis stemming from a 'fear of missing out', keeping up to date on social media, and breaking news coming at us 24/7. So far, the evidence to support these claims has only been hinted at or has been largely anecdotal. There has been an obvious lack of a strong empirical foundation.
In a new study, conducted by a team of European scientists from Technische Universität Berlin, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, University College Cork, and DTU, this empirical evidence has been presented regarding one dimension of social acceleration, namely the increasing rates of change within collective attention.
"It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has indeed become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example." says Professor Sune Lehmann from DTU Compute.
COMMENT:-
Is this a case of "We aren't actually getting dumber, it's just that we are trying to take in information faster than is actually possible and we are doing that because we are being bombarded with more information than we can actually digest when we take it in."?
Abundance of information narrows our collective attention span
The negative effects of social media and a hectic news cycle on our attention span has been an on-going discussion in recent years--but there's been a lack of empirical data supporting claims of a 'social acceleration'. A new study in Nature Communications finds that our collective attention span is indeed narrowing, and that this effect occurs - not only on social media - but also across diverse domains including books, web searches, movie popularity, and more.
Our public discussion can appear to be increasingly fragmented and accelerated. Sociologists, psychologists, and teachers have warned of an emerging crisis stemming from a 'fear of missing out', keeping up to date on social media, and breaking news coming at us 24/7. So far, the evidence to support these claims has only been hinted at or has been largely anecdotal. There has been an obvious lack of a strong empirical foundation.
In a new study, conducted by a team of European scientists from Technische Universität Berlin, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, University College Cork, and DTU, this empirical evidence has been presented regarding one dimension of social acceleration, namely the increasing rates of change within collective attention.
"It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has indeed become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example." says Professor Sune Lehmann from DTU Compute.
COMMENT:-
Is this a case of "We aren't actually getting dumber, it's just that we are trying to take in information faster than is actually possible and we are doing that because we are being bombarded with more information than we can actually digest when we take it in."?
