The Attention of a Goldfish
Here is TMI about TMI.
TMI stands for “too much information,” often used to express disgust when the conversation turns too personal. TMI also signals information overload or disinterest, a flag that says “Stop. I don’t want to hear anymore.” TMI was coined in 1988. However, internet acronyms like TMI, LOL, and STFU became popular in the early days of the internet as shorthand to save space — to compress Twitter messages to 140 characters, for example.
But it’s not just space. Think of the time saved by replacing three words with three letters. It could easily save as much as two seconds of valuable time that could be diverted to your Nobel prize winning research. But first, there’s another dozen emails to peruse, cute pet tweets to watch, and the new outrages of the other political party to fume over. But then… yeah, definitely, back to focusing on your research or your novel or your homework. Time to pay attention.
Except many people believe that they have lost the ability to pay attention, that they are buried under the onslaught of information cascading from smartphones and the internet. We have a world of global information at our fingertips. TMI.
It’s like we are standing under a waterfall of plunging information — we can’t see past the rushing water, and we can’t see the individual drops. Maybe it’s more like a waterfall of ping pong balls, thousands bouncing in all directions, and we have no idea whether to chase after the ping or the pong. So, we look everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
We are losing our ability to pay attention.
Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, writing in 2022:
I had just turned forty, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration, as if it was a friend who had vanished one day at sea and never been seen since.
Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, writing in 2010:
Over the last few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading.
As these writers have sensed, the brain is changing to accommodate how we use it, in short bursts of attention punctured by constant distractions:
the multi-car crash of emails
hyperlinks which draw us away from the primary text
the pressure to multi-task
the endless demands for our attention from the internet, television, radio, earbuds, and more
the surge of choices of how to spend your time
the need to balance work-time with family-time
Most of the evidence for deteriorating human attention is anecdotal — like Carr and Harari, who observed the change in concentration. It’s very difficult to ignore interruptions because we instinctively respond to something new. A new email, text, or web feed immediately draws our attention away from our work because the new brings a momentary surge in dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward. It becomes an expectation and then a habit.
Microsoft Canada attempted to establish baseline attention data to verify deterioration between 2000 and 2013 by surveying and testing 2000 consumers. They confirmed declining reader attention by issuing a report full of staccato bullet points, chopped up paragraphs, and easy-to-swallow sentences — a child’s guide to adult attention. In the introduction to the report, they chirp: Good news! It’s not as bad as you think.
They go on to posit that the average human attention span has fallen from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013. Say! That is good news! But then they point out that a goldfish has a nine second attention span. (Start looking now for a goldfish to be your lab partner.) So the good news is that the average human attention span is falling below the standards for lower life forms.
The goldfish bullet-point ricocheted around the internet, instigating so-called “deep dive” reports of well over 200 words of hand-wringing about human deficits. TIME magazine ran goldfish headlines.
Why were people so quick to accept this bizarre statement? How do you measure the attention span of a goldfish anyway? Or a human’s for that matter. Apparently, no one took the time to think it through, to pay attention.
We are not bobble-heads bouncing off in different directions every eight seconds. Think about it: plenty of people binge-watch Netflix or a sporting event for more than eight seconds. The goldfish analogy was new and shocking enough to glue eyes to the website. However, the Microsoft study didn’t examine how long a person could pay attention in general. Instead, it studied how long a person would watch an ad on a website before looking away. Now eight seconds doesn’t seem short — it is way too long to pay attention to an ad.
Microsoft Canada sought to persuade advertisers to sharpen their advertising — to paint their advertising ping pong ball so brightly that it stood out in the ping pong ball torrent. According to the report, advertisers should accept that human attention runs from zip to nil, that advertisers should reduce advertising complexity from “Try our delicious soup” to “Soup. Good.” TMI.
Satya Nadella, the current CEO of Microsoft, says in the report:
…the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.
So, we — our minds and eyes — are scarce.
Big Tech thrives on our attention. Their social media platforms exist to capture, captivate, and hypnotize your attention to sell to advertisers. The longer you look at the web page, the more they profit. The more information they collect on you from your clicks and purchases, the more they profit. You and I are roasted pigs, numbed, dumbed, and delivered on a digital tray to marketers.
And manipulating our attention is the foundation for the process of diminishing human attention span.
Sean Parker, now a multi-billionaire, became president of Facebook when the company was only five months old. Manipulating human attention was the goal from the beginning. Parker said:
The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them... was all about: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”
The answer was to exploit human longing for bursts of dopamine. Parker continued:
The inventors, creators — it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
In 2017, Parker, speaking at an Axios conference, observed:
[Social media] literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.
Children’s brains are developing with limited ability to focus and to engage in linear thought. In 2008, nGenera (now Moxie Software) conducted a study of the impact of the internet on students who have grown up using the internet. From a study of 6,000 “Generation Net” students, nGenera reported that:
Digital immersion has even affected the way they absorb information. They don’t necessarily read a page from left to right and from top to bottom. They might instead skip around, scanning for pertinent information of interest.
What about academically-distinguished students? Philosophy major, Rhodes scholar, and student body president at Florida State University, Joe O’Shea said:
I don’t read books. I go to Google, and I can absorb relevant information quickly… Sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the Web.
Scanning for “pertinent” and “relevant” information suggests that the students are merely looking to fill in the blanks for their existing thesis.
Google and other search engines generate factoids in seconds, but of dubious relevance, because search engine algorithms calculate relevance mathematically. It measures popularity. Google “Sam Adams” and you get beer, brewery, and “for the love of beer.” TMI. Sam Adams was an American patriot who aided the Boston Tea Party in the 18th century — nothing to do with your beer party plans.
Of course, you can read a book “cover to cover” to vacuum up information. But reading a book does much more by creating narrative which posits cause and effect. Narrative also establishes associations between disparate pieces of information. Through their narrative, authors edit the information: which piece is important, which is myth, which pieces caused change. Authors align the ping pong balls of TMI into a coherent vehicle of thinking, debate, and knowledge.
A book creates an experience of depth and substance. The internet is wide, thin, and shallow. TMI.
In the clamor for our attention, TMI becomes TMD — too much distraction.
Deteriorating attention feels personal, as if you are doing something wrong and losing mental skills. But, as authors like Nicholas Carr, Johann Hari, Maggie Jackson, and others have pointed out, this is a societal problem. Big Tech is changing how all of us think, even changing the structure of the brain. It’s deliberate. And it’s devastating to a world reeling in global crisis.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.