Adrian Barich: how so-called smart phones and social media have given us a worse attention span than goldfish

I was talking to my daughter the other day and was stunned when she said most young people these days couldn’t sit through a movie — a film is way too long.

Now, maybe I could be accused of not paying attention myself, but can I just say: what?!

But apparently it’s true. It’s called “TikTok brain”, after the phenomenon of short-form content reducing consumers’ attention spans.

Our attentiveness has been chipped away at by social media, until — wait for it, drum roll please … but only a short burst as I may lose you — our average attention span is eight seconds, according to research by Microsoft (and that was in 2015, though not much suggests this has changed).

Eight seconds! What can you do in eight seconds? Have a look at your watch now and wait eight seconds (if you have a watch these days; if not use your phone).

You might be able to tie one shoelace (if the dog’s not around), paint two nails, do 13 push-ups (I tested that), get our Hyundai i30 from 0-60km/ph. I mean Usain Bolt couldn’t even finish 100 metres.

And how’s this, the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. Just let that sink in. Although the Microsoft research, which showed attention spans dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight in 2015, is much debated, there seems to be no doubt so called smartphones are making us lose the ability to concentrate.

And according to the young people of today, social media apps are to blame, in particular TikTok.

The platform is based on relentlessly pushing short videos, chipping away at our attention spans.

Research shows that viewing short-form content releases dopamine in the brain and can help develop a vicious cycle of doomscrolling or doomsurfing — which is obsessively checking social media feeds for updates, with the expectation that the news will be bad.

And guess what? We’re being cleverly manipulated. Let me explain what they are doing to us.

Small dose videos on TikTok (most are less than 30 seconds) for a couple of hours now somehow seems more attractive than sitting down and watching a full-length movie. Heck, it’s not even wasting time, is it?

And the easy bite-sized nature of the media makes it much more appealing, doesn’t it?

And on top of that, the algorithms of modern apps are based on the principle of random reinforcement. Which I’ve learnt means, you win some and lose some. You might watch a short video (or reel, I think they call them) and even though it wasn’t particularly exhilarating, you just know there will be a good one around the corner and that’s what you’re hanging out for.

That’s why you keep scrolling mindlessly — you’re searching for the pay-off, for the hit of dopamine. It’s all a big trap to cause you to become addicted.

In the 1950s, an American psychologist discovered that when rats received regular pellets as rewards for pressing a lever, they soon became uninterested. But when the food is released unpredictably, “the rats became obsessive, even abandoning their usual activities (grooming, eating, sleeping, etc) to chase the high of the next big win”.

So guess who’s taken that research and applied it to humans? Yes that’s right, the tech developers.

My daughter tells me it’s called “brain rot” and that’s why everyone is self-diagnosing with ADHD.

Here’s a few more stats to horrify you.

The average human attention span has decreased by nearly 25 per cent between 2000 and 2015. One in four teenagers regularly forget important details of close relatives and friends.

Seven per cent of people even forget their own birthday. Even back in 2014, according to a survey of 2000 people by Tecmark marketing agency, we were picking up our phones more than 1500 times every week — that’s once every 5.5 minutes.

The good thing is the kids know about this stuff (you guessed it, from social media) and they understand that they experience burnout more than any other generation and obviously that all leads to mental health problems.

Apparently there’s no easy cure either; focus is not something that you can just swipe on. So our kids (and maybe some of us) are making a huge sacrifice — the young people are right, “brain rot” is a thing and we’re changing our brain functions.

I think I can sit through a whole movie at the cinema but ask your kids or grandkids what they think. I think you’ll find that to them they can get the same emotional hit elsewhere in a much shorter time. They might actually get “stressed” if they have to wait more than a minute for a video to finish.

Just have a close look at how they skip through videos on their phone. They are always swiping or skipping five seconds ahead, desperately chasing that dopamine hit.

It’s something for those of us who work in television to think about as we try to attract younger viewers. Gen Z is now used to getting their information (news) when they want it and immediately. I was laughing the other day when a teenager asked why he had to wait to watch the footy. Why couldn’t he have it now?

As we explored further why you have to wait for your favourite television shows, he dropped this classic saying — that he didn’t really like the news because mostly it’s just people talking.