There are so many conversations I have with people who tell me that they are not able to focus nowadays due to social media. These conversations mostly go the same way: the person usually tells me that they think that instagram (or social media in general) is ruining their attention span, and their attention span has drastically reduced since the use of social media.
Of course, I am not denying that social media is affecting our focus or memory. It is definitely making us more distracted, and causing us to procrastinate on other tasks. But I do think that people use this as too simple an explanation for something that could point to something bigger. To put it simply, I do believe that social media is a distraction, but I do not think that this is the whole story, and I do not think that our attention span is necessarily being reduced.
As someone who has ADHD, the issue of “focus” is really fascinating to me. The reason I find it fascinating is because everyone seems to say the same thing but they don’t seem to be doing anything about it. In general, it is hard to provide concrete solutions to this problem because everyone’s attention works so differently.
The truth is, ‘attention’ is not as simple as it may seem. It is something that varies with each person, and each task. Growing up, I always had trouble focusing my attention on a specific task. When I told people about my struggles, they told me to ‘remove all distractions’ and ‘just focus.’ I tried to put my laptop or phone away, but it did not miraculously fix my attention span.
This leads me to the point of my article. Most productivity tips and videos these days emphasize on removing distractions and modifying our environment. They instruct us to stop using social media, to cut it off completely, and to observe the change in our attention spans. Most of us end up feeling disappointed when we do not see the change we want to see. But what we need to understand is that our attention spans are not fixed, and they don’t change with the technology we consume either.
Moreover, when we do put our phones away, our attention spans do not naturally become longer. A lot of us use social media to alleviate stress. When we try to eliminate this distraction, we still have the urge to check it. This may not be because our attention span has dwindled, but because we simply need an outlet for reducing our stress which often social media may offer. Temporarily removing social media may be good at sustaining our attention, but what we really need to deal with is the underlying issue: the stress that causes us to use social media. There are some studies that support this stance; they all state that internet use, very often, is used as a coping mechanism. It is used as a method to cope or compensate for stressors. If we want to improve our attention span, this is what we need to deal with.
It is easy to think that we are losing control of our attention these days, because we do have a lot of things to focus on. We have so many responsibilities that it is not a surprise that we notice our minds wandering. So we end up thinking our attention spans are getting shorter whereas our attention is simply being pulled away by different forms of media in a million different ways.
There is another reason why this argument is problematic. While researching the concept of attention, I came across many articles that claim that technology is shortening our attention spans, but there is not as much research done on attention span as I thought there would be.
Firstly, there is no consensus on the average attention span; it is stated to be 8 seconds, 10 seconds, or even 12 seconds. The concept of an average attention span is a gray area. Most of the experiments done to study attention span are uncertain as well. They ask people what their attention span was years ago, but there is no guarantee that these people accurately remember how good or bad their memory was. There are many studies that compare our attention span to that of a goldfish, but this claim was refuted by many sources.
Furthermore, determining how technologies might be affecting cognitive functioning is more complicated than it seems. Laboratory based research on cognitive functioning cannot easily be translated into the real world to provide explanations for a relationship between technology and the brain. While some experiments may tell us how our technology may affect our brains in controlled conditions, this does not guarantee that it would affect us the same way in the real world. Social and environmental factors heavily dictate how these technologies affect people in their day-to-day lives.
Therefore, even though there is evidence that attention is impacted due to the use of social media technologies, it is limited to highly controlled conditions. This body of research, however, does not provide any evidence that the impact is happening on a biological level.
In order to understand how technology affects all of us, it is important to understand that attention is a highly complex process that interacts with perception, memory and conscious experience. It has voluntary and involuntary elements and is heavily influenced by factors like interest, motivation and self-regulation; these factors vary from person to person. In order to understand and make the best use of technology for learning purposes, we must focus on how these technologies are designed and implemented. The intention of the people who designed these technologies is also important to study about if one wants to learn about their attention. Many of the elements of the internet have been specifically designed to keep you looking at it. This is a concept known as persuasive technology.
Persuasive technology is a type of technology that is designed to change attitudes or behaviors of the user through persuasion and social influence. They are the tiny notifications and features on your phone that keep you coming back to an application; the creators of the application intended for these features to capture your attention. As we interact more with social media, this technology is only getting better at ‘hijacking’ our attention. We may feel like our attention span is reducing only because these companies are getting better at grabbing it.
When I was researching for this article, almost all of the studies and videos seemed to lean towards this prevalent view that technology is making us lose our focus. This video was one of the few videos where the creator seemed to dig deeper for an explanation, instead of accepting this loss of attention span as face value. Essentially, she tells us to do the same; after all, it is worth questioning what we know about our attention. Are our attention spans really reducing? Do we easily succumb to distractions, or is the world around us becoming more distracting?
In my opinion, I like the perspective this article and the video have taken; because it does not put all the blame on our attention. It allows us to take into account all the environmental factors that play a role here. If we start to think about this issue in a different way, it could help us navigate our lives around these technologies instead of solely focusing on removing all distractions.
Increasing our awareness about attentional processes and how we can use technology to enhance them could help educators develop strategies to help students manage and direct their attention in an efficient way. They can also help us work around these distractions by using them to enhance our strengths. For instance, research scholars always focus on how short form videos like YouTube shorts or Tiktok might be reducing our attention span, but they can also help in grasping more information in a shorter amount of time. We can use characteristics like these to our advantage.
It is clear that these technologies are only going to get better in the future. By changing the way we think about them and the ways we interact with them, we can learn to direct our attention to what we wish to focus on and work with technology instead of against it.