After sitting through a performance at a North Shore playhouse last week, you felt, “that was wayyyy too long.” It’s not the first time you’ve noticed this antsy feeling recently. And it makes you muse…
Was it really the show? Or is your attention span shrinking? Maybe it’s a result of the quick-moving digital culture in which we’re immersed.
In a relatively short time, the mental environment has become all too comfortable with short stuff: texts, posts, emails, tweets, pop-ups, even shorthand headlines that crawl on the bottom of TV screens while you’re trying to watch the big picture.
If you send someone an email with more than, say, three lines, you’ve learned they might not read the bottom one. So you don’t put anything really important down there.
If someone starts telling you a long story, you might feel like spinning your hand in the air to signal “yeah, yeah, then what?” You don’t do this, but you get the urge. Attention span deficit?
A movie with a concept that sounds like fun might be scratched off your list when you hear it runs three hours. You loved watching baseball once, but now it seems draggy. A play with two acts sounds better than one with three. And a non-intermission shorty is better yet.
Kids who grew up tweeting and texting from birth understand this. Adults born before all that are in a transitional stage. But humans are adaptable. Could be that people are slowly (or kinda quickly) evolving into a new species of human. Call it, maybe, homo twitterus.
Enough. Point made. Your smartphone just vibrated. Time to move along.
