A matter of concentration

How long is your attention span?

It is a truism that kids these days have extremely short attention spans.  As evidence, one may point out that reading a text message or watching a TikTok video takes only a few seconds, while watching a full episode of a TV show (excluding commercials) takes over half an hour and reading a book requires several hours.  The implication is that younger people are much more inclined toward the first two activities, their elders toward the latter.  (To make a good contrast we should probably take current teenagers and their grandparents, respectively.)

Of course any generalization about generations is overly simplistic.  The variation in attention span among individuals is very wide, even with comparable ages and situations.  We may cite our tutoring consultant, who requires an extended time to settle in to any project or task.  By his estimate, he needs at least 20 minutes to adjust to his environment before he starts to make progress.  He is unhappy at scheduling less than an hour for anything significant.  One of his colleagues, in contrast, finds it difficult to concentrate on any subject for more than 20 minutes, so she must schedule a series of short efforts in order to be effective.  Such a contrast is by no means unusual.

Still, our environment does have a significant effect on how long we’re willing to put up with any particular thing.  We’ve been reading stories by an ancestor about life in the first part of the 20th century.  Evening entertainment consisted of reading books or playing cards, or sometimes recitations.  A rubber of bridge required concentration-time measured in hours.

That changed somewhat with radio.  Radio programs seemed to be more or less standardized at an hour (with wide variation), shorter than almost any book.  Even worse, the commercials ran to about 30 seconds, which meant that any effect had to take place during that period.  We sometimes listen to a local radio station playing programs from the old days, when Maxwell House coffee would try to get one’s attention in between acts of an hour-long radio drama.  The shift to TV made things a bit more passive, since one no longer had to produce one’s own image of the action, but the commercials stayed roughly the same length.  (There is no doubt somewhere a scientific analysis of radio vs TV commercials, in length and content.  We haven’t looked for it.)

Now we have text messages and broadcasts limited to 168 characters (or whatever it is).  On the other hand, we remember an account of a kind of experimental archaeology.  Some years ago a group of people were set to work a farm in England for a year using Iron Age techniques, that is, restricted to the technology and practices of the Anglo-Saxon settlers during the Dark Ages.  No TV, no radio, no streaming.  Raising Emmer and Einkorn wheat took long days of work, during which an hour could seem a short time.  We wish we could find the reference, but we remember one participant saying he learned to think, not more slowly, but maybe more patiently.

So you’re born with a tendency toward an attention span, but it can be modified by your surroundings.  Which means you do have some control over it.  How long is yours?