According to the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology, the definition of attention span is “​the length of time an individual can concentrate on one specific task or other item of interest.” Simply put, attention span is how long one can concentrate on a task. In the fast paced world of social media, people, especially teenagers are getting better at multitasking which gives the impression that the attention span now-a-days has been getting shorter and shorter. This begs the question,​ ​how is social media affecting teenagers’ attention span in the US and what may be some ways to cope?

In the era of social media, teenagers have been flipping back and forth between using social media and focusing on school work and real life. As defined by the American Psychological Association, “​Cognitive effort​ is defined as the engaged proportion of limited-capacity central processing.” Simply put, cognitive effort is the effort by the brain on processing or completing a task.​ ​In their “​Internet is giving us shorter attention spans and worse memories, major study suggests”, Mike Wright and Ellie Zolfagharifard cite an unnamed study and claim, “Experiments reviewed in the study showed that people who spent their time constantly flipping between short activities online “require greater cognitive effort to maintain concentration”.” This can be alarming as this suggests that not only are attention spans getting shorter but the work done by the brain in order to complete a task has been slowing down. Cognitive effort helps people in decision-making processes as well as in completing tasks within a given amount of time. This might bring one to question why might this be the case? Why does multitasking require more cognitive effort to maintain concentration? ​Wright and ​Zolfagharifard claim that this happens because, “The​ limitless stream of prompts and notifications from the internet encourages us towards constantly holding divided attention — which then, in turn, may

decrease our capacity for maintaining concentration on a single task.”​ The more notifications-whether it be from emails or social media-pop up, the harder time people have focusing on their tasks. This constant need of multi-tasking and holding divided attention can cause one’s brain to be tuned into a routine of dividing one’s attention. One may think that this might be the case only for online activities. However, Wright and ​Zolfagharifard further claim citing other unnamed studies, ​“Overall, the available evidence strongly indicates that engaging in multi-tasking via digital media does not improve our multi-tasking performance in other settings – and in fact seems to decrease this cognitive capacity through reducing our ability to ignore incoming distractions​.” Overall, this article establishes the claim (with evidence) that attention span (in general) is not only decreasing but so are memory and retention abilities.

In McClinton’s ​“Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don’t Last as Long, Study Reveals.”, McClinton states,​ “​Released on Monday in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the study (done by Technical University of Denmark) shows people now have more things to focus on – but often focus on things for short periods of time.” McClinton also claims, ​“​The empirical data found periods where topics would sharply capture widespread attention and promptly lose it just as quickly, except in the cases of publications like Wikipedia and scientific journals. For example, a 2013 ​Twitter global trend​ would last for an average of 17.5 hours, contrasted with a 2016 Twitter trend, which would last for only 11.9 hours.” Here, McClinton delves into how Twitter trends represent people’s interests in that topic and how the trends on Twitter seem to last shorter and shorter. The study done by the Data collected by different experimenters suggests that people lose interest in a subject just as quickly as gaining interest in it. McClinton evaluates how people, in this case mostly teens, have a diverse range of

topics that they’re interested in but only for a short period of time. This is seen in the data collected by the author and interests seen on Twitter. However, one counterpoint to this may be that not all trends seen online are lost offline as opposed to the study from ​Mike Wright and Ellie Zolfagharifard’s article​. One such example is the Black Lives Matter protests. According to the article, History of the Hashtag #BlackLivesMatter: Social Activism on Twitter by PewResearch, the tag trended on Twitter for a few days but offline, the biggest waves of protests had lasted for months with many continuing on until now. McClinton’s article fails to recognize how people on social media present themselves differently than offline, especially when taking the route of selective activism, showing one’s personality and completing tasks. This can be especially true for teenagers whose interests might change from week to week. Overall, this article establishes the fact that attention span is in fact shortening, however some of the arguments used in the article, specifically the one regarding online interest vs offline interest was very intriguing and somewhat inaccurate in terms of generalizing.

In the “Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as leveller?”, the authors suggest that social media might actually help people focus on their daily lives. Growing up in the age of the internet, it can be easy for teenagers to feel overwhelmed with an influx of information causing them to be hyper-aware. In the article, the authors state, “​The findings, based on a four-wave panel study conducted during the 2010 Swedish national election campaign, show (1) clear differences in media use between age groups and (2) that both political social media use and attention to political news in traditional media increase political engagement over time.” Different age groups in the study used social media for different

purposes. Teenagers, however, used this in order to participate in politics and increase civic engagement. ​This specific article shows how social media can help with that and deliver news in small bits and pieces, especially for political and civic participation. Social media can help teenagers more interested in exploring different ideologies as well as be intrigued in learning more about politics. It can also level the burden of learning information in classes where information is not presented in a fun manner or is too overwhelming and instead learning in bits and pieces on different social media websites. Social media has been traditionally viewed as a means of engaging younger audiences and being addictive. However, this article changes that perception of social media being a means to an end and instead be seen as a leveller between reality and the online world.

In order to cope with a changing attention span, Lodge and Harrison recommend focusing on completing one task at a time and taking short breaks periodically in their “​The Role of Attention in Learning in the Digital Age”​ article. They suggest that there is much speculation on whether or not attention spans are in fact changing much, if at all. In order to cope with difficulty paying attention, they suggest to focus on one at a time and to manage one’s times better by planning out daily activities.

Citations Page

Wright, Mike, and Ellie Zolfagharifard. “Internet Is Giving Us Shorter Attention Spans and Worse Memories, Major Study Suggests.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 6

June 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/06/06/internet-giving-us-shorter-attention-spans- worse-memories-major/.

McClinton, Dream. “Global Attention Span Is Narrowing and Trends Don’t Last as Long, Study Reveals.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 17 Apr. 2019, www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/16/got-a-minute-global-attention-span-is-narrow ing-study-reveals.

Kristoffer Holt, Adam Shehata, Jesper Strömbäck, Elisabet Ljungberg. “Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as leveller?” SAGE Journals, 11 Feb, 2013, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0267323112465369

Lodge, Jason M, and William J Harrison. ​The Role of Attention in Learning in the Digital Age​. 25 Mar. 2019, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430174/.