I read somewhere recently that said attention span on social media is now down to a shocking 47 seconds per article or post. Ten years ago is was around two and a half minutes.
And apparently, the average time spent reading blogs is 16 seconds. Which suggests that most people have given up on this blog already!
This state of affairs now has an official title: Brain Rot. Basically put, brain rot is excessive consumption of short videos that are the lifeblood of platforms like TikTok in particular, but also Facebook, Instagram and the myriad of other platforms vying for our attention. In addition of course so many of us are on several WhatsApp groups pinging away regularly whilst we try to deal with texts and the continual array of pop-ups.
On average a worker can check emails up to 77 times a day. Just imagine twenty years ago popping to check if the postman had been, 77 times daily. Mad, right?
It’s not all about FOMO either. It’s the dopamine rush when we get a message or approval from someone, anyone. About, anything. But mentally, it can be exhausting as well as unnecessary.
According to Dr Vigneshwar Paleri, a clinical psychologist writing on Yahoo, our brains are knackered (non-clinical term) by the effort of trying to manage all manner of online attention seeking missiles being hurled in our direction. Our brains simply weren’t wired for it all. Feel free to read Dr Paleri’s full article here. If you can spare the time.
DON’T JUST BLAME IT ON YOUTH
Young people are apparently buying burner phones so they can’t get distracted by social media. This is an encouraging sign, but in reality what percentage are actually doing this?
But it isn’t just young people who are incumbent in this trend of low attention span. I used to work with two women in their fifties who on their break time would sit and scroll endlessly through their phones, like programmed robots. And what used to get their attention most of all? Short videos on TikTok and Facebook.
Of course all of this isn’t good for truth and authenticity, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announcing last week the ending of its fact-checking programme in the US. This is likely to mean more people with attention span deficits seeing a fleeting headline and presuming it to be truthful.
How many of them are likely to stop, seek out a fact-checking website and explore further? But I don’t imagine Mr Z is too concerned with such trivialities.
HITTING THE LOW NOTES
I have noticed it myself with my song-writing. When I first started to post my songs on Facebook nine years ago, average engagement percentage was high. When I started my dedicated song-writing page I had a handful of followers . Now, despite having 180 followers I’ll be lucky if I get a dozen plays from it for a new song release.
And checking through other songwriters and artists FB pages, including those with much higher follower numbers than me, this seems to be pretty much the norm. This from people who have made the decision to follow a page for updates on an artists music.
In the end it is probably because we are asking people to put aside around four minutes to listen to a song. In these days of constant distraction and busy lives, four minutes can seem like a long commitment.
SO WHAT HOPE FOR THE BLOG?
Well there are people way more qualified than myself to answer this, but the fact is there are still over four million million blogs posted each day, so somebody is reading them. And of course the average reading time of 16 seconds is probably skewed by the subscribers to blogs who don’t bother reading them and instead just open and click ‘like’.
So if you have got this far reading this blog thank-you and well done, you are obviously someone who likes to buck the latest trend. For now at least.
SONGS AND SCRIPTS AND DUNKING BISCUITS 
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