In this times and age we’re at the place where our attention span is extremely low. Thanks to internet, for the most part. How so? Well, we're getting blustered by the virtually unlimited amounts of content (text, video, audio, image ... etc.) constantly. At all times. 24/7/52/365! With an overexposure of such magnitude it gets hard to immerse into a subject and invest time into any form of research. Mix it with FOMO and you get the recipe for shallow approach to information, art, politics, literature, entertainment and ultimate ... life.

Music

Streaming music gives us freedom of choosing what to hear and when, which makes it extremely hard for the most to find patience and focus for hear an album in its entirety. And  regardless what you think about the album format, it is a piece of work put together by the artist. There is a reason behind it. You don't just take a part of Mona Lisa and show that, do you? Just her left eye. The young even hard time getting through the entire song before they skip to the next.

Online articles

Established news media are forced to write stuff like “Article continues below video” in order to make sure that people understand that the article they are reading is not finished just because there is a video placed in the text.
for the most part reading the news consists of reading the headline and perhaps those few lines of summary. Some media even have a “Read the remaining 458 words” button, which is a perfect example of the horror that is lack of time and will to invest some time into getting immersed into … well anything.

Video

YouTube gives us anything anytime, but the enormous amount of data has resulted in us loosing interest very quickly. Now we can double tap on the sides of our phones to fat-forward even faster. Something needs to happen. Momentarily. Otherwise we’re out of here. No immersing, no introduction and setting of the stage which is often just as important. We just need the highlight, here and now. The rest is waste of time and even anxiety provoking.

Can you imagine if that was the approach to for instance Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”. If movie with same sense of build-up and innuendos as well as approach to showing violence was created today, most would scroll away and see couple of minutes of “action” and forget the rest. At the same time the approach to the “action” scenes in that movie would be found ridiculous because it’s not direct and few minutes later a “review” in a comment section would determine that it’s such a bad movue.

Even more extreme are those 10-20 seconds long videos often posted on Social media, where for the most part it’s necessary to write “Wait for it…” to make sure that people don’t scroll away, because God forbid they should have patience to see the entire 10 second video if they don’t know that something happens at the end.

The article continues below the video.