What Causes Attention Deficit?
Social media has changed the way we people used to communicate, make new relationships, and develop them. It is also changing the way people used to handle multiple tasks at the same time. What was just a proposed theory years before, has now become an established fact that multitasking actually fails both the purposes, it was supposed to solve.
It is widely accepted now that multitasking actually takes more time to complete work and then, the quality is always poorer. In the age of technology and services, we have got used to instant gratification of curiosity and getting answers. In such situations, people have lost the patience to research for facts.
How Digital Media Changed Our Attention Spans?
Digital Media and technology have converged to produce more information now than ever. This means that people are encouraged to collect fleeting information, as compared to reading and analyzing the information. Then later, the facts are separated from fiction.
Attention has become a valuable asset today and the digital media uses it as currency. Gone are the days when online companies used to make money off direct sales. Nowadays, they have all entered into an indirect model of revenue generation. This is a model where they strive to become an established platform that is being visited by the internet-browsing crowd. It is all about eyeballs, clicks, taglines, petitions.
Bombarding of Information
Bombarding of information on the online outlets can cause someone's attention to fluctuate very easily. It is just like someone who has just walked into a buffet meal and finds a wide range of dishes laid in front of his eyes. As he cannot try his hand at all the dishes at the same time, he will have to pause after a few dishes. Once he is done, he won't go back to those dishes, even if he found them really delicious. He reasons, "Why have all of some things nice, when I can have some of all things nice?”
The World is Getting Smaller
If you have seen the movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: World’s End, you must have seen the beautiful, retrospective moment, where Captain Barbosa reflects that the world is getting smaller. To which Captain Jack Sparrow replies in his imitable style, “No. The world’s still same, mate; there’s just less in it”.
In a nutshell, this is the problem people are facing with content nowadays. Thanks to the advent of technology in our life, we can travel the entire world with a simple click of the mouse.
A few clicks will take us to the top of the Great Wall of China and a few more will take us to the icy plains of Greenland. The world does seem a smaller place now, thanks to the Internet that has more speed than the winds that sail ships. But when a few clicks can take us all over the world; do we really have time left to let one beautiful image stay on our computer screen, so that we can look at it for long, let it stir our emotions?
