With the rise of technology, it shouldn’t be a surprise to people that their attention spans are becoming a lot shorter than what they were a few years ago, as now we have all of this information at our fingertips.
It’s not uncommon to be having a conversation with someone and they just pull out their phone and start looking at other things and completely zone out as to what you’re saying, but they could also be multi-tasking, which I think the majority of us are guilty of.
I was talking to my friend Alexander (Alex for short) about how weird it is that most people have just accepted smartphones into their daily life where some people have rules about them and others don’t. For example, my parents don’t mind that I bring my phone to the table at dinner and play Candy Crush as they are watching TV, but his parents make him leave his phone in his room.
Then while talking about attention span, of course, he had to challenge me saying he had a better attention span than I did, but I didn’t believe him as every time we spoke, he would always get out his phone as soon as he heard a notification.
Thinking of a way to see who was actually more focused than the other, I remembered I downloaded this app called ‘I Love Hue’ which is basically a game where you have to sort the colours into their correct position.
We both came to the agreement that we’d both download the app and go through as many levels as we could before exiting the app and checking something else. At first, we were going to time it, but I felt like it was going to be too much like a competition then, I mean it was already a competition as Alex and I are both quite competitive.
After what seemed like forever going through the levels and trying to sort out the colours, I peered over to Alex’s phone and saw he was already on Facebook messaging
other people, so I think it’s fair to say that I won this round, even though I did get distracted and looked at his phone, but at least I ignored my messages!
He admitted he only got through the first few levels before he got distracted and started looking at his social media, while on the other hand, I got through to the next stage and because it was a little harder than the beginner stage, that’s where I found myself being distracted.
At least now I can say I have a better attention span than him even though I’m not entirely sure how accurate this test was, but I do recommend downloading the app as it is quite calming once you do complete a level.
References
De Vita, E. (2015). Proof that we are driven to distraction by social media. [online] Ft.com. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/4f5d0404-de90-11e4-b9ec-00144feab7de [Accessed 16 Sep. 2017].
Gizmodo (2017). Notifications on phone. [image] Available at: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/04/how-to-keep-phone-notifications-from-ruining-your-life/ [Accessed 16 Sep. 2017].
I Love Hue. (2017). I Love Hue – Out now on the App Store and Google Play. [online] Available at: http://i-love-hue.com/ [Accessed 16 Sep. 2017].
Moser, C. and Schoenebeck, S. (2016). Phones at the dinner table: U-M study explores attitudes | University of Michigan News. [online] Ns.umich.edu. Available at: http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/23864-phones-at-the-dinner-table-u-m-study-explores-attitudes [Accessed 16 Sep. 2017].
NeuroTracker. (2017). Do Humans Have Shorter Attention Spans than Goldfish?. [online] Available at: https://neurotracker.net/2017/05/24/humans-attention-span-shorter-than-goldfish/ [Accessed 16 Sep. 2017].
Work in progress 