The Blessing of an Elusive Attention Span

Virginia Heffernan wrote a terrific piece in the NYT Sunday Magazine in late November 2010. Entitled “The Attention Span Myth,” she questioned the idea that the human attention span is in danger of eroding against the onslaught of technology and media. She spent a good part of the article arguing against enshrining  a long attention span as a morally and intellectually superior quality. But I found this particular paragraph the most powerful:

Whether the Web is making us smarter or dumber, isn’t there something just unconvincing about the idea that an occult “span” in the brain makes certain cultural objects more compelling than others? So a kid loves the drums but can hardly get through a chapter of the “The Sun Also Rises”; and another aces algebra but can’t even understand how Call of Duty is played. The actions of these children may dismay or please adults, but anyone who has ever been bored by one practice and absorbed by another can explain the kids’ choices more persuasively than does the dominant model, which ignores the content of activities in favor of a wonky span thought vaguely to be in the brain.

This insightful point puts the constant barrage of statistics on texting, video, and cross-media consumption into a very different light.  The point is that the cause and effect are essentially backwards. The always-on twitter-sized mediaverse is not creating our restless attention spans. Rather, our restless attention spans are creating the mediaverse. The reason that kids are texting their friends in history class isn’t because they are so different from the kids of 50 years ago, it is because they can. Quite simply, there were fewer options to being bored a generation ago. Back then, you could doodle, pass notes, or daydream. But if The Beaver and Cindy Brady could have gossiped with their friends instead of listening to a lecture on the Magna Carta, you can bet they would’ve done it. If good ol’ Dad in the worn leather chair could have checked out the sports scores when Ed Sullivan rolled out the trained dog act, you can bet he would’ve done it too.

In marketing circles, there are many who decry the media clutter as the enemy of effective communications. They protest that those fragile attention spans are making their jobs harder. With a bewildering number of choices at people’s disposal involving not only what types of media they consume, but when and how they consume it, it’s harder than ever to put across a marketing message. It was so much easier when people just stayed glued to their television sets. For this very reason, good marketers ought to be rejoicing. You used to be able to get away with being boring and expected as long as you had a big media budget. Now, the game is changing from who can command the airwaves to who can command attention. The winners will be those who can be the most interesting, entertaining, and engaging. That is a great thing for marketers. The harder it is for a company to connect with its current and potential customers, the more valuable those who can do it well become. Advertising people who used to complain about having to crank out formulaic commercials can revel in the challenge of making something that people will actually enjoy. I can’t speak for all my colleagues, but if smarts and creativity are increasingly the best ways to win, I can’t wait to play.