Short Attention Span
So I was thinking, as I often do every now and then thanks to the wonderful ability of intelligence beset upon me by Crom and I got to thinking how in the digital age, our attention spans are strictly become shorter and shorter.
Now, that shouldn't come to any surprise to most of us men, considering how we're built to glance at women and judge them sorely on their appearances, instantly judging yay or nay if they are worth our time. But now, that same judgmental reasoning seems to be our forms of media as well.
I remember long ago, before the internet came around, how the newspaper was one of our main sources of news. How people would look forward to receiving this big stack of paper that they paid a dollar for, on a daily basis, to come home in the evening and read it. I remember when I used to read the newspaper on a daily basis and tended to flip through every section of the newspaper, now I didn't read it all, seeing as sections on fashion or the latest 4 page spread about upcoming vehicles did not interest me at all but I still took the time to read the major stories and glance through those other sections, looking at the headlines.
I also remember a time when the evening news predated the cable news channel, where you didn't know what was going to be shown on the news, unless you sat through it all and listened to the enter broadcast. This was back in the day before cable's rise, where every other news program had a ticker at the bottom of the screen, giving you the quick low down on the day's event.
However, as our world has become so much more digitized, everything is being fed to us at a quicker and faster pace. Newspapers, though still relevant are going the way of the dodo in print form in favor of on-line news sites that can bring us the latest and greatest breaking news in an instant, usually in no more than a few paragraphs at a time until they expand upon all details. And even now, a few paragraphs is giving way to 140 characters of less for breaking news.
The news isn't the only thing that has become shorter. Entertainment has gone that way too. I remember when Adult Swim first came out and there were shows that lasted for only 12 minutes. I always found that way too short and it perplexed my mind as to how such a format could survive. Certainly, there have been skit shows before where a skit didn't even last more than 5 minutes but I always took it into considering that the entire program lasted a good hour or two in its entirety, yet here we had all these different shows, one after another, that had no connection to the previous, each one trying to fire at us at full power to get us to chuckle.
I guess however they were ahead of their time when they began these micro-shows for as the years progressed and the rise of broadband/high speed internet grew, media evolved to cater to our short attention span. There are so many sites out there that look to entertain us with media that barely lasts 5 minutes. Nowadays, a video has to be short enough to hopefully go viral, so that everyone can see it and it becomes the IT thing of the moment.
Even video games have started to go that way. There was a time when a video game could basically be played endlessly. Back in the early days, it was expected you could play a game until the cows came home and then come back the following day to play it again. Then, as the medium grew, we began to get stories and some games were designed to roughly last someone so many hours, though still provide us with enough fun to replay it again and again. I would say that in the mid 90s to early 2000s, video games began to achieve a sort of consensus as to how long a video game should last, only to then see the amount of time it took to complete a game begin to dwindle in the mid 2000s to an average of 8 to 12 hours with only enough fun for 1 play through. And now as we are well underway into a new decade, it seems that gaming has embraced its earlier roots, with mini-games that you can play again and again, games like Angry Birds or Farmville where 15 minutes a day is all that is required out of you, yet you keep coming back for more and more without an overly complex story in the way.
Even the most popular type of games, FPS, are basically for those with a short attention span. Where a match can last a few minutes before beginning a new one, against a totally different random opponent.
Though that is not to say everyone has a short attention span, there are still plenty of media formats that require one's full attention, books for instance require your full attention, an on-going television series, RPGs, even a 2 hour movie. Yet despite everything, I believe the fact that we have so many entertainment options at our fingertips these days, we honestly don't have any choice but to be brief and to have short attention spans, only reserving our full attention to what we believe might be of true value to us.
Now, that shouldn't come to any surprise to most of us men, considering how we're built to glance at women and judge them sorely on their appearances, instantly judging yay or nay if they are worth our time. But now, that same judgmental reasoning seems to be our forms of media as well.
I remember long ago, before the internet came around, how the newspaper was one of our main sources of news. How people would look forward to receiving this big stack of paper that they paid a dollar for, on a daily basis, to come home in the evening and read it. I remember when I used to read the newspaper on a daily basis and tended to flip through every section of the newspaper, now I didn't read it all, seeing as sections on fashion or the latest 4 page spread about upcoming vehicles did not interest me at all but I still took the time to read the major stories and glance through those other sections, looking at the headlines.
I also remember a time when the evening news predated the cable news channel, where you didn't know what was going to be shown on the news, unless you sat through it all and listened to the enter broadcast. This was back in the day before cable's rise, where every other news program had a ticker at the bottom of the screen, giving you the quick low down on the day's event.
However, as our world has become so much more digitized, everything is being fed to us at a quicker and faster pace. Newspapers, though still relevant are going the way of the dodo in print form in favor of on-line news sites that can bring us the latest and greatest breaking news in an instant, usually in no more than a few paragraphs at a time until they expand upon all details. And even now, a few paragraphs is giving way to 140 characters of less for breaking news.
The news isn't the only thing that has become shorter. Entertainment has gone that way too. I remember when Adult Swim first came out and there were shows that lasted for only 12 minutes. I always found that way too short and it perplexed my mind as to how such a format could survive. Certainly, there have been skit shows before where a skit didn't even last more than 5 minutes but I always took it into considering that the entire program lasted a good hour or two in its entirety, yet here we had all these different shows, one after another, that had no connection to the previous, each one trying to fire at us at full power to get us to chuckle.
I guess however they were ahead of their time when they began these micro-shows for as the years progressed and the rise of broadband/high speed internet grew, media evolved to cater to our short attention span. There are so many sites out there that look to entertain us with media that barely lasts 5 minutes. Nowadays, a video has to be short enough to hopefully go viral, so that everyone can see it and it becomes the IT thing of the moment.
Even video games have started to go that way. There was a time when a video game could basically be played endlessly. Back in the early days, it was expected you could play a game until the cows came home and then come back the following day to play it again. Then, as the medium grew, we began to get stories and some games were designed to roughly last someone so many hours, though still provide us with enough fun to replay it again and again. I would say that in the mid 90s to early 2000s, video games began to achieve a sort of consensus as to how long a video game should last, only to then see the amount of time it took to complete a game begin to dwindle in the mid 2000s to an average of 8 to 12 hours with only enough fun for 1 play through. And now as we are well underway into a new decade, it seems that gaming has embraced its earlier roots, with mini-games that you can play again and again, games like Angry Birds or Farmville where 15 minutes a day is all that is required out of you, yet you keep coming back for more and more without an overly complex story in the way.
Even the most popular type of games, FPS, are basically for those with a short attention span. Where a match can last a few minutes before beginning a new one, against a totally different random opponent.
Though that is not to say everyone has a short attention span, there are still plenty of media formats that require one's full attention, books for instance require your full attention, an on-going television series, RPGs, even a 2 hour movie. Yet despite everything, I believe the fact that we have so many entertainment options at our fingertips these days, we honestly don't have any choice but to be brief and to have short attention spans, only reserving our full attention to what we believe might be of true value to us.