We
live in an increasingly digital world where every imaginable piece of
information or source of entertainment is at our fingertips. It is
fair to say that we have become accustomed to instant gratification.
“Goldfish Effect” is a body of work, which examines the
ever-diminishing attention span of modern digital citizens and how we
got here.
As far back as the Edo dynasty, Japanese courtesans chose to have
a literary theme on their Kimonos in order to demonstrate their taste
and discernment.
Fast forward to the British, post war, tourism boom, when working
class, factory workers flocked to seaside holiday camps such as
Butlins for two whole weeks of merriment and pneumonia, under the
bracing, British, summer sunshine! In the 60’s and 70’s the ever
so slightly, saucy, seaside postcard was the preferred method of
communicating the essential “who, what, why, where and when”
regarding the weather, the food and the winners of the knobbly knees
contest to the folks back home.
A recent study carried out by researchers in Canada has concluded
that our increasingly digitized lifestyle has had a dramatic effect
on our ability to concentrate for long periods. It states that
the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds at the
start of the century (around the time the mobile revolution began) to
8 seconds today. The scientists go on to claim that this is one
second less than the attention span of the average goldfish, hence
the term “Goldfish Effect” was born. They don’t actually
explain how they managed to measure the attention span of a goldfish
or even what a goldfish would be concentrating on anyway, but let’s
not allow hard facts to get in the way of an entertaining theory!
Today, the current digital generation, who have grown up
communicating by means of mobile devices have virtually abandoned
such archaic notions as the paragraph, the sentence or even the word!
Young folks increasingly use social media acronyms – FYI, IMHO, LOL
etc to get their point across. 8 seconds suddenly seems like more
than enough time.
