Global lack of collective attention
Individuals have a hard time paying attention to information, so prevalent and much. People now have more to focus their attention on. As a result, they don’t spend as much time doing each thing. A new European scientific study shows this. Thus, public debate has become fragmented and ‘accelerated’.
Social networks and news updating have become much more available to people. Therefore the negative consequences associated with increased posting speed (social acceleration) is a common topic of debate. Based on this, there is not yet any empirical evidence on the topic but academics are working hard to find out more information. The study confirms that the production and consumption of content is indeed increasing. The result is a decrease in people’s attention spans. It has been happening across all spheres including social media, books and other fields.
Researchers from Germany, Denmark and Ireland, published the paper in the journal Nature Communications. It analysed 40 years of movie ticket sales, popular books on Google Books, Twitter data from 2013 to 2016, time spent on Wikipedia from 2012 to 2017.
The study then turned to using mathematical regression analysis to predict three factors: “the interest of the topic, the time it remains popular in the public sphere, and the desire for a new topic,” according to Dr. Philip Hovell, professor of applied mathematics at Cork University in Ireland.
Research showed that the increased production of content leads to less collective attention. When a topic becomes very popular for a short period of time, it is followed by the next topic in the industry due to intense competition.
Sometimes specific topics might capture the public’s interest for a short amount of time before disappearing from sight. This did not apply to Wikipedia, journal articles or other similar documents for reasons that remain unclear.
Professor Sun Lehmann of the Technical University of Denmark was presenting on how our attention is shifting over time. Today, there are different things to pay attention to. Having more things that need our attention, the division has caused a decrease in it.
Philip Lawrence-Spren, a researcher, who was part of the study, said that “the increasing volume of information that is depleting our attention and the urgency to innovate is collectively driving us to change topics much more regularly. We mark a global lack of attention stability.”
These findings do not apply to professional journalists who produce the information and compete for speed of news, but to a collective level. Nor do they apply in how news is consumed at an individual level.
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
