Insta-Depreciate
The dismantling of the attention span
Scroll. Double tap. Scroll scroll. Emoji-only comment. Social media has made it easier for everyone to appreciate content with the attention span of a goldfish. Perhaps it’s the urgency of not having enough time to appreciate something, or maybe you are being fed so much content that the norm now is to only devote seconds to each piece. Whatever it is, things have changed.
I have been a part of social media since MySpace arose in 2005. Since then I have tried many platforms, but keep to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. All three of these social platforms involve scrolling vertically (or horizontally if you have adopted Facebook’s recent alternative application Paper). The speed of your scroll matches your care for seeing content. If there is a lot of worthy content, you scroll carefully. If you can quickly eyeball and tell there is a bunch of crap, you pass it all up. We all need info as fast as possible.
Twitter has shortened my attention span over the last five years because a tweet can only contain 140 characters. They’re short and to the point, sometimes even shorter with a photo or link attached. Tweets leading to longer articles for further depth have been my favorite, although I have noticed I don’t particularly like articles longer than, say, 4 paragraphs.
Facebook might be the worst of them all. It has honestly degraded from its inception in terms of what its users are spending their time in sharing. Facebook posts can really range in length; a post can far exceed the character limit of Twitter. Most posts are irrelevant to your interests, too lengthy, too pointless, I can go on and on. My attention can barely be held by anything my high school friends or ex-coworkers share to the news feed. I spend most of my time skimming over articles under “Tech” and “Headlines” respectively in their new app, Paper, which I am quite fond of. Check it out.
Instagram posts consist of a square photo and a caption ranging from nothing to paragraphs long. In my experience, I have posted long captions, but try to keep them to the point whether informative or an attempt at making the viewer laugh. The trend I found is those posts get far less attention than my favorite captures with short captions. When I spend time with friends and see them on Instagram I observe the way they absorb content. They literally scroll at the speed of light and double tap to like posts. Sometimes I doubt whether they really appreciated the content, let alone saw it.
One more thing I have noticed in my online behavior is my attitude toward video content. If the video is longer than 4-5 minutes and isn’t a music video chances are I will never see it. Instagram videos are 15 seconds long and most people don’t even like watching those. Vine videos are a mere 6 seconds.
This could quite possibly be the direction we are heading in the social space: incredibly short and sweet content with purpose. If you read the entirety of this article I applaud your effort and maybe you aren’t part of the 99%
