What is your attention span and has it changed over your life?

Gosh, great question. I so hear you. No, I don’t follow tweets, I don’t hang about face book, why? because it doesn’t interest me and yes, I cannot focus on the drivel that permeates it. I battle at most to read a question here fully. Some grab my attention. I prefer pictures and graphics, thats why I hang out in virtual chat, where there are avatars and colors and rooms I can see. It holds my attention. I don’t know why I am like this or what happened, I suspect it is a certain anxiety as opposed to age. I get bored easily too.

Huh? Wha.. “Can you…” – what?

… look, something shiny!

If I’m doing something interesting, I’m hyper-focused to where I may not even notice you’re in the room trying to talk to me. Most of the rest of the time, about 8–10 seconds and I’m off. My attention down has always been weird; technology hasn’t changed it.

I have no patience for television.

I much prefer waiting until a series I like is on DVD. Then I can bang the whole thing out in a couple of days, and move on to something else. I want to see the story – not spend my life waiting week after week to get to the end.

TL;DR

Just kidding.

It’s definitely shortened in general. At the same time I’ve found when a specific topic or effort engrosses me I tend to get more absorbed than I used to so in a way to the point of forgetting about other things like eating… and sleeping, so perhaps it balances out.

Twiter/Facebook no, but that’s less to do with attention and more to do with not caring. Texts are fine (to a point, at some juncture a phone call is just faster and easier) as is email or even snail mail. Articles are no problem unless they seem stitched together with superfluous info then I tend to just skim for key points. TV, streaming, on demand, disc only; sports are something of an exception though it’s not like I sit around watching the ads. Novels, are fine, I read nearly daily, though I never seem to have less than six going at a time so maybe that says something. Starting a business, easy says someone who currently can’t be bothered to do start another. Raising a kid, no thanks – but, again, that’s little to do with attention span.

I tend to attribute a lot of that to the internet with exponentially increasing (interesting) information on demand. The need to parse large amounts of stuff quickly, including n views/articles all on the same subject/event/point to get that info and the ability to unconsciously switch tracks becomes very helpful. Prior it seemed the effort was more to extract as much as possible from limited sources. Maybe it’s still attention and focus just applied differently and more widely by necessity.

Hope that wasn’t too long for ya ;-)

Mine has always been about the same. I never liked reading books. I tend to read apecific articles on a topic I am interested in. On fluther if an answer is very long, or there are already many many answers I might just skim, or just skip everything and say I did not read the answers and then state my own response. If it were a topic I was very interested in the answers then I would read them, but if I am just offering an opinion, much less likely to read them all.

I can watch TV for hours, but I only like to watch shows I truly enjoy. DVR is so awesome! Being able to record and watch only what I really want care about seeing. I record everything from History shows, movies, sit-coms, drama, and a few select political shows like This Week and Meet the Press.

I don’t like Twitter, but I do like Facebook. However on facebook I rarely spend a lot of time. Usually I just post what I want, read the first few status posts that appear on the news feed, and sometimes make a comment. Once in a while I spend a solid hour or two on facebook, and it is usually a lot of fun. I also created and maintain a closed group on facebook that I am very proud of actually, and I do have to spend time updating events on it and photos and answering questions.

@wonderingwhy So, to try to develop your thought there, I am thinking about when I was growing up, there wasn’t so much information available. Three or four channels on TV, a newspaper or two, and maybe some magazines and some books.

Now, with the internet and Google, we can get thousands of hits on fairly obscure topics within seconds. Worse, when we travel through those articles, we have hypertext, so one link can lead to an exponentially increasing number of links.

So the way we travel through information has changed. Instead of traveling linearly, as we did through printed materially, we can jaunt off on side adventures easily, and perhaps never get back to our original paths. This may make it feel like we have short attention spans, but perhaps we are constructing our own narratives as we go, and we really are exhibiting focused attention.

If that is the difference between hypertext and print novels, for example, then when we choose to focus on someone else’s version of the story, we are submitting to them. Whereas, if we go into hypertext, we can make our own version.

It could be an issue of control. Do you submit to someone else’s story or do you insist on constructing your own? Knowing how I am about wanting my own way, I can see that hypertext could be much more interesting to me.

I think as I get older I find that my attention span has changed in that instead of trying to take everything in I only focus on certain things. I admit I do not understand the Twitter and Facebook thing (I am on Facebook but do not really use it) as my attention span will not allow me to sit and read about people checking in for pizza and feeling the need to tell the world.

I find that with television I kind of half watch things unless I am really interested in it and with the newspaper I really just skim read as I get bored with it and I do rarely read books even though I have so many of them.

No tweets for me, dropped facebook a year and a half ago, bored me, have no patience for stupid sitcoms, although I do like a few old series like Frasier and Seinfeld. I can read online or in real life for hours, if the content captivates me enough. I’m a knowledge junkie and love diverse and interesting information. I do not follow politics at all, if one wished to force me to put a bullet in my head it would only take about 2 hours of political ravings for me to wrench the gun from their hand and just shoot myself. lol

I have always had a very selective attention span, my teachers used to say for years in my report cards etc.that when something captured my interest wild horses couldn’t drag me away, but, if the interest is not there, nothing will motivate me.
I remain the same now, this is why I require tons of freedom in my work, I do not do micro-managing, and ultra anal, by the book, follow the rules to a “T” protocol.
Makes me crazy. haha

My attention span hasn’t changed much over the years. I get interested in a topic and may read a book on it but then I lose focus and pick up an interest in something else. The Internet encourages this behaviour and I cannot focus on any one subject there for more than an hour at a time. My attention span is very poor when it comes to the television. I zap channels to escape the adverts and the style of presentation on programmes I do find interesting often puts me off. The images on the screen are beautiful but they jump about too much and the background sounds are loud and distracting.

@wundayatta That may be true for most people who didn’t absorb and process information back before the WWW went mainstream, but for those like me, the only conference is that I spend less time searching. It used to take me hours to find info like the correct gauge of wire to use on a Novak Super Rooster ESC, and I used to spend hours (if not days) just looking.

Maybe I lived in an information world before everybody else did?

too short at times. Can watch tv and vidcasts fine, but for writing, I can only type out a few sentences before zoning out, therefore, don’t expect me to write out long answers.

Comparable with the wingspan of an albatross, when I was a kid, more akin to that of a sparrow hawk.

Same as ever, flibbertigibbet.

Not a fan of TV either, it pisses me off. Like you, I’ve no patience for commercials. There’s so many, all the time, and it’s such a waste of time. Facebook kind of annoys me, because I really don’t care what you’re having for dinner. I admit though, I post just as asinine things on there, that is, whenever I even go on it.
Novels, I read all the time. Movies and video games, just as much. I like drawing, and it can absorb me for hours.
When thinking about this, I don’t think any of this has much to do with my attention span as a whole, rather than what I have patience for and am interest in. :/ If something interests me, it can have my whole attention for hours. I’ll watch Xena Warrior Princess like mad, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer bores me to tears. (all on DVD for me too, please, screw cable TV) So it seems that my attention span is great and as strong as iron, but only for what it personally finds value and worth in.
For example, you have no idea how much time I can spend grinding levels in some wired framed RPG. Hours, days, weeks. But stick me in front of some FPS like Call of Duty and my attention span will find itself a lot more fulfilled by checking out some random stain on the wall. So for me it’s a matter of interest, not much to do with my actual attention span.

All of you who hate commercials, pay the $10 a month and get a DVR. It changes your life! There is so much interesting programming on now.

I find that often the commercials are the only parts worth watching! But really I pretty much only watch sports on telly, although I do like some of the cooking shows too. I still love to read but I fall asleep a lot. I like to listen to books on my iphone while I run or do other jobs that do not require my head to be engaged. My attention span has never been that good and while I do not see it diminishing it sure isn’t getting any better either!