It might be a good thing that modern generations are increasingly multi-tasking, but it does seem that they are also increasingly unable to concentrate on any one ‘thing’ for more than a few minutes. Maybe that’s even a few seconds rather than minutes. Whatever it is, it’s very short.
I mean, years ago, a person would read a book end to end before picking up the next one. Ok, sometimes they might have two on the go, if one seemed a bit hard going, but today’s attention spans are the equivalent of having 50 books open and reading a paragraph from each and moving to the next, and then returning to a random different book to read the next paragraph.
Today, people will flit from one thing to another, and are so constantly distracted that they actually never fully experience any one thing totally or properly. It’s why they chatter in the cinema or play on their mobiles and then don’t understand what’s happening in the film. It’s why they watch 2 minutes of a TV programme and then zap off to other channels, missing the crucial point. It’s why they skip to the next song on their iPods rather than sit through the full 3 minutes.
Hey, how would today’s generation deal with long symphonies or progressive rock concept albums? Well, of course, they wouldn’t. How can they learn how to do any one thing well, rather than everything badly? Well, of course, they don’t.
It is the lack of good attention spans that leads to nothing being finished, concluded or understood by the majority of the population. In fact, I blame the lack of a good attention span for this ending mid-
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