Living in the age of attention (W1)
Due to my topic “Digestible content”, I tried to break it down to the basic idea which I think it’s about attention and media. Because digestible content is made to catch people’s attention using media as a tool.
After that, I researched about attention and media in the past. I throwback to the pre-digital age when there still have media but in physical form and only have one function for one device. Not every people could reach the media and information. So, the attention was abundant and information was scarce which is in contrast with the present. The breaking point is the internet which is the time when the media in physical form change into digital form as well as the information. The internet breaks the barrier between information and people. So that made a huge change for people to access the information easier.
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
James Williams (a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute)
In the digital age, there’s an abundance of information. The only limiting factor is our attention. So at the moment, the attention is scarce and the information is abundant. It seems like our attention span keeps decreasing as time passes by. In 2000, the average person’s attention span is 12 seconds. However, in recent research, it’s less than 8 seconds which is shorter than a goldfish!
Is the abundance of information the cause of the decrease in attention span?
So the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used upby information, as though it were some finite, quantifiable resource, but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.
James Williams (a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute)
Actually, the amount of information isn’t the cause here. It’s naturally the processing of our brain that isn’t built to be multitasking together with the ability to control your attention. The challenge of keeping and losing control begins.
However, what made it worst?
