In recent times, some parents and educators have become concerned about what has been captured as ‘shrinking attention span’ among school children with some stakeholders blaming social media platforms.
Attention span is the amount of concentrated time a person can spend on a task without becoming distracted.
Most educators such as psychologists agree that the ability to focus attention on a task is crucial for the achievement of any goal. Having a long and developed attention span around the ages of 16-20 is important. These are some of the most crucial time periods of life and they must be spent making the best of the time available.
Changing with age, during preschool years, attention span is most commonly determined by age, gender, and type of activity. For young children their attention span is only extended when they are doing an activity that they thoroughly enjoy. As children grow into teenagers attention span becomes even shorter.
This shrinking attention span has been attributed to social media and technology. Teenagers are often wrapped up in their phones and their social media that it is hard for them to stay focused on one thing for more than 8 seconds, without having the urge to constantly keep up on their social media.
According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the average attention span of a human being has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. This is one second less than the attention span of a goldfish. Goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds.
These findings show some interesting patterns, 25 percent of teenagers report forgetting important details about their friends and family and 7 percent of people forget their own birthdays from time to time, and the most astonishing, typical mobile users check their phones more than 150 times per day. Social media has had an immense impact on teenagers, and the sharing on social media has double from 2011 to 2013.
A recent study by Microsoft, the software titan surveyed 2,000 people and used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor the brain activity of another 112 in the study, which worked to determine the effect that smartphones and the ability to be so closely attached to digital media and these devices, and the effect on daily lives. One of the positives that emerged from this study is the ability for individuals to multi-task based on the availability of so much technology in their daily lives.
Microsoft’s study was based on Canadians, that were surveyed and those who had more digital lifestyles or the early adapters of social media do in deed struggle to focus in certain environments where the attention of an individual is needed for long term reasons.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
