In an era of digital disruptions and reduced attention span, everyone should learn this old journalistic adage: ‘Keep it short and simple’.
THERE is a lesson for speakers in general – don’t bother to give a lecture, talk or sermon that is more than 30 minutes unless you are confident of holding your audience or you have a captive audience that is forced to listen to your monologue.
Unfortunately, many speakers are not aware of the shrinking attention span of their listener, especially the younger set.
Like most politicians, many speakers seem to love holding on to their microphones even as their listeners’ minds drift away.
They are probably too engrossed to see their audience fidgeting in their seats, trying not to fall asleep, looking bored or worse, have started looking at their phones.
It’s not just speakers that should remind themselves but journalists, too. The days of lengthy text or reports are over.
No one has the patience to read tedious length articles when the average Tik Tok video is less than a minute while X, formerly Twitter, allows only 140 characters. Videos uploaded on Instagram are also usually a minute or less.
This is the Age of Instant Noodles, Instant Coffee, and Instant Information, after all.
A decade ago, research had already shown that between 2000 and 2015, our attention span had shrunk by a whopping 25%.
A year ago, a 2023 report stated that the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds in the last two decades.
In the case of Gen Z, it was reported that these youngsters, who have been characterised as having “hearing problems”, have an attention span of around 2.5 minutes, which is significantly shorter than the attention of previous generations.
Well, our lives have become more preoccupied now. Our texts keep flashing on our mobiles even if the ringtone is switched off.
Giving online talks is probably the worst as many listeners, especially the younger ones, prefer to switch off their cameras. So, we have no idea if they are following – or even if they are there at all. At least, one can change the approach if it’s a physical audience and humour can be injected to spice up the discussions.
Most of us prefer texting over talking on the mobile phone because we can perform other tasks if we don’t have to speak. We don’t mind voice messages as we then decide when to reply.
Older people prefer to call you on the phone not realising that they are interrupting your work. We could be at a meeting, in a train or having meals but old people, including my 93-year- old mum, have no clue of that.
She gets very upset when I do not pick up the phone immediately. So, I get yelled at practically most times because she has a hearing problem, which is expected at her age, and we are expected to take such calls immediately.
Our lives have become much busier and many of us do not have the luxury of being entrapped in a long lecture because all the good intentions with the research and prepared decks goes to waste if the listeners lose interest.
As a journalist, I have also allowed breaking news alerts to appear on my phone, and this has become a non-stop exercise!
As I struggled to write this article – the result of having to endure a traumatic monologue of one hour and 20 minutes recently – I have been interrupted numerous times. The shows how much digital media affects our lives, and the result is the decline of our ability to focus, and to listen for too long.
A 2023 CNN report, quoting Dr Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how digital media affects our lives, said in 2004, “we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2 ½ minutes’’ but ‘’some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds.’’
Oftentimes, especially those in the media and finance, have two screens in our workplace. The reality is that we cannot stay focused on one screen for too long.
Writer Alf Rehn wrote that there should be a 20-minute rule for public speaking, reminding us of an old quote, attributed to American businessman Phil Crosby, that goes – “no one can remember more than three points.’’
Rehn argued that “the fact is that we often can’t remember even that many. Life is just too busy and too confusing to really focus more, so regardless of how many brilliant notions are thrown in our way, we subconsciously try to pick out just a few, sometimes, just one, to make sense of it all.’’
The optimal attention span for an audience, i.e. the attention span that can be comfortably held by an interested human engaged to listening to a speaker is not five to 10 minutes. Instead, it is about 20 minutes.
Well, these experts are going to argue and dispute over our attention span but the long and short of it is it is shrinking.
And that brings me to my final point – this article must end too, like now, before the reader gets bored. The point has been made already. This is the Age of Instant Noodles, Instant Coffee, and Instant Information, after all.
