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October 11, 2009 in Features
You’ve got 10 minutes
With our shortened attention spans, that’s all you’ve got before your audience begins to drift away
Kat Flemming prepares her timer for the start of a meeting of the Toastmasters at Center Partners in Coeur d’Alene on Wednesday.
(Full-size photo)
This story is about why people can’t seem to pay attention for long periods of time anymore, especially our young people, and whether we should be worried about this fact.
It will take less than 10 minutes to read. Honest.
Why 10 minutes? Because any longer, and your attention will drift away, according to John Medina, author of “Brain Rules.”
“What happens at the 10-minute mark to cause such trouble? Nobody knows,” he says. “The brain seems to be making choices according to some stubborn timing pattern, undoubtedly influenced by both culture and gene.”
Sound bites
James McPherson of Whitworth University teaches several classes on media issues, and he’s also active in the American Journalism Historians Association.
He’s 51. A baby boomer, he’s long been intrigued by the shortened length of various things in media and popular culture.
Some examples:
•Sound bites. In television news, they dropped from “more than half a minute in 1968 to about 10 seconds by 1988,” McPherson said. Now, they average about 7 seconds, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
•Movie trailers. For one of his classes, McPherson found on YouTube a trailer for the 1954 film “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
“The trailer is 2.5 minutes long,” McPherson points out. “Today in a theater, in that 2.5 minutes, you’ll see five trailers.”
•Movie scenes. “From 1930 to 1960, most films averaged two to four minutes per scene and many scenes ran four minutes or more,” according to film studies writer David Bordwell. “In films made after 1961, most scenes run between 1.5 and 3 minutes.” Scenes lasting less than a minute are no longer uncommon, he pointed out.
•Television commercials. In the 1950s and 1960s, the average length was one minute. In subsequent decades, the average length of TV commercials decreased to 30 seconds. Today the majority of commercials last 15 seconds, and some are just seven seconds long.
•Letter writing. The U.S. Post Office blames its current money woes, in part, on the decline of letter writing. Mail volume is down 14.7 percent, compared with a year ago. Meanwhile on the mega-popular Twitter, messages are limited to 140 characters.
•Public lectures. An endangered species, because their average length is still 45-to-90 minutes, including question-and-answer periods.
“My wife and I like going to public lectures,” McPherson says. “I make my students cover them, and they get real fidgety. Part of it is a generational thing.”
Another generational difference? When McPherson grew up, there were just three television stations. Boomers watched one show all the way through, including those one-minute commercials.
Recently, for this story, McPherson’s “Writing for Mass Media” class wrote some thoughts on their generation’s attention span.
About the three-TV-station anecdote, sophomore Kelsey Stewart says, “It’s the type of story that sounds weird and boring to me, but every generation has their new thing that makes the old way of doing things obsolete.”
Monkey Brains
Are our attention spans getting shorter and jumpier, mainly because of the Internet?
If yes, is this so-called monkey brain phenomenon a problem?
Short answer: No one knows for sure, but writers love to write long stories and books about it.
In the July/August 2008 Atlantic, in the article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr wrote: “I’m not thinking the way I used to think. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Carr acknowledges that “we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.”
In the best-seller “Outliers” writer Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. Practice explains the success of baseball and basketball greats, math and computer geniuses and business superstars, he says.
So how will anyone get 10,000 hours of practice in our 10-minute attention span world?
Some folks aren’t too worried.
Mike Herzog has taught at Gonzaga University for 40 years. The English professor and administrator says, “There’s nothing wrong with our students’ brains. I don’t believe all this stuff that ‘Well, they don’t read anymore, so they don’t know anything.’ It’s just a much more scattered world they live in. It’s a world many of us don’t recognize. But there may be an upside to this so-called short attention span. It allows them to access a whole lot of information.”
Daniel Cubero, Whitworth senior, agrees.
“I have a terrible attention span. I love it,” he says. “It’s not that I can’t focus. It’s that I focus on everything at once. It keeps the mind fresh and moving and always working toward a better way of doing things.”
Tell it well
Young people, just like older folks, can still focus – and for much longer than 10 minutes. They just have to be engaged in the material, be it a book, a movie, a video game, a conversation with a friend.
Though not necessarily a fan of the book, Herzog is amazed at the popularity of the 406-page novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West” and the other books in the series which revamps classical witch stories.
“I think a well-crafted story will always work,” Herzog says.
Todd Kavanagh of North Idaho has been active in the speech club, Toastmasters International, for six years. During meetings, speeches are limited to five-to-seven minutes. But at conferences, speeches can go longer.
“If you are talking about something you are passionate about, and it has a clear pattern of organization, your audience is going to be engaged,” he said.
If young people are engaged, focus follows.
Pam Murphy, Whitworth sophomore, says: “I can sit on a computer and design for hours on end. I will look up and it will be dark all around me, and I have no idea how much time has passed.”
Bottom line to catch attention in this monkey-brain world? The experts agree: Tell it quick. Or tell it well. Or both.
Well, there’s your less-than-10 minute story. Thanks for staying with it. Twenty years ago, this story would have been twice as long.
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omaha on October 11 at 8:49 a.m.
I agree with the professorr’s idea that attention spans are much shorter; however, I have to disagree with one example that the professor uses. He states, that the U.S. Post Office blames its current money woes, in part, on the decline of letter writing and cites mail volume being down as one of the main reasons. In addition, the example implies that Twitter with its limitation on characters is the cause of this drop.
First, the US Postal Service has been bleeding money for many decades. The US Postal Service’s woes have nothing to do with short attention spans, it has to do with a terribly bloated and mismanaged government service that has a monopoly. It is horribly mismanaged and this has very little to do with the lowering volume of mail in the past 15+ years. Email has been very popular for the past 15 years and it has no limitations on characters. Twitter has been around for how many years? One or two?
This was just a lazy example.
Rifleman__Dodd on October 11 at 9:18 a.m.
Actually the limit is 3 minutes. Note VH1 and music videos.
Response time at ATM’s etc. is three seconds.
garfnagn on October 11 at 9:40 a.m.
Long column.
omaha on October 11 at 9:49 a.m.
garfnagn, your comment was the funniest thing I’ve read in the past 10 minutes.
jimmycurr2145 on October 11 at 1:45 p.m.
My granddaughter (13 yrs) has been filing hotmail emails listening to music in her mixbox and answering my questions about social networking accounts & twitter. It all seems confusing to me. But she can talk with me about subjects and maintain for much more than 10 minutes.
If a book is well written and she is interested in the subject she can read for a long time. I am certain that teaching at this level is not like teaching in the 50’s & 60’s.
Shane0312 on October 12 at 9:34 a.m.
Im too broke to pay attention.
GunnyHanson on October 13 at 6:06 p.m.
Hmm……Omaha says the Postal Service has been bleeding money for decades. I disagree in part because Omaha failed to mention just how they are bleeding money. I disagree, too, because sending a letter clear across our nation costs just 44 cents. Try delivering it yourself for 44 cents. Back in the Pony Express days, it cost several dollars to send a letter from the frontier to California and then there was always the likelihood that the letter wouldn’t make it for one reason or another. Postal rates have gone up over time for the very same reasons everything else is more expensive. Next time you whine and whimper at the thought of spending 44 cents to send a letter just across Spokane, just jump in your car and spend your time and gas delivering it in person. Even if you took the bus to deliver it, that’s still at least a buck and way more time. I tried to keep this comment short so you folks with really short attention spans could read the whole thing without glancing at the 15 second tv commercial.