How the Internet is ruining our attention spans
A world where pictures speak much louder than words
I’ve recently come to the scary realisation that I have an attention span that’s equivalent to the memory of a goldfish. Three seconds. Three seconds and my mind is already elsewhere, opening up a new tab on Facebook, Instagram, checking my phone, scrolling through my apps or thinking about what to eat. What happened to me? Ten years ago, when my phone wasn’t the centre of my universe and social media didn’t exist, I actually had the ability to focus on a task without feeling the sudden urge to open up YouTube or browse for clothes online.
Am I the only one suffering from this affliction? Probably not. What I’ve noticed over the past few years with food blogging (or blogging in general) is that people aren’t interested in long-winded blog posts anymore. People want snappy tl;dr summaries. People want photo diary recounts of their holidays, not lengthy written recounts. Instead of reading blog posts, people now turn to Instagram for pretty photos and short one-sentence summaries loaded with emojis. We don’t have the time, the energy or the attention span to open up a blog post in a web browser and read it in full. Instead, we open up easy-to-access apps like Instagram, Facebook or Twitter and read a snappy summary and admire the aesthetically pleasing images as we scroll through our endless feeds.
Is the Internet to blame for our reduced attention spans? Perhaps. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Internet. I live and breathe the Internet and couldn’t imagine my life without it. But it’s important to take a step back and look at how it may be affecting the way we think, live and focus. As the wise Roman writer once said some 2000 years ago, “To do two things at once is to do neither”. Let’s all move away from multi-tasking and start to buckle down, focus and start single-tasking. Let’s take the time to read the details instead of glancing at photos in our Instagram feeds. This is one of the reasons I’ve switched my food blog, Drool Worthy World, to Medium, because it celebrates the written word over pictures. When was the last time you opened up a book and actually finished it till the end? When was the last time you read an entire article from start to finish? Hopefully, it was this post.
