[ExI] shortening attention spans

[Anders Sandberg]

Quick summary: it is not our attention spans that are getting shorter, 
it is the opportunity costs of wasting time on boring stuff that are 
getting larger.


I wonder if we really have shorter attention spans. It certainly *feels* 
that way, but a few years in Oxford and too much cognitive bias 
literature has made me distrust my own judgment.

Case in point: novels have become extremely thick over the past two 
generations. Sitting here in my mother's apartment watching the 
bookshelves, I note that most of the novels from the early 7/10th of the 
20th century, both fine literature and detective stories, are pretty 
thin books (with a few exceptions). In the 80s they started to swell. 
These days most novels are thick, and I think it is indeed word 
thickness. Now that would suggest that attention spans are not flagging 
(and that word processors allow authors to write more). Looking around 
the net I see that writers claim there is a trend towards shorter novels 
again because of economic reasons of bookstore shelf space, but ebooks 
could certainly change that. Doing some statistics suggests that it is 
not the average length that is going up, but the minimum length.

Similarly, movies have for technical reasons become able to be epic in 
length, and I assume there are economic reasons too (how much would you 
pay for a ticket to a 50 minute movie?). Yet the clipping has become far 
faster - seeing young people encounter Kubrick's 2001 for the first time 
is instructive. They better not try Tarkovsky's Solaris.

So my theory is that we can pay attention for a long time - but we want 
a lot to happen per unit of time too. We want faster rewards, more action.

Why? Perhaps because there is so much stuff out there, so the 
alternative cost of spending a lot of time on something that does not 
turn out to be worthwhile is higher. In the time you have spent reading 
this post (and I writing it) we could have read several RSS entries and 
short blog posts, watched a YouTube clip, browsed Wikipedia or run a 
calculation in our favorite math program.

If this is true, then we should expect the trend to continue: it is 
rational to demand quick and reliable evidence that whatever we have in 
front of us is relevant or interesting. Spending a lot of time finding 
out if it actually is by just consuming it would mean we would often 
waste precious time and attention on things that are not as good.

There is of course a tradeoff here, since some important things do not 
look inviting (since they were made before the current attention 
economy) and some unimportant things masquerade as important. Smart 
agents balance the exploration with exploitation.

This is why reliable filtering and reviewing actually are key transhuman 
technologies. And why training to recognize the real cost and value of 
what you are doing is such a key transhuman virtue.


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University