Ryan Lopano Blog

Writing this was harder than it should have been, and all of it had to do with the issue at hand: attention spans. In recent years, my attention span, as well as others around me, has really gotten worse. With the changing social media landscape, it is hard to avoid distractions. While writing this, I struggled not to check my phone or talk to my suitemates. The whole concept of being able to sit down and completely focus on what you are doing is really hard now. As Johann Hari writes, “We are living in a serious attentional crisis — one where our collective ability to focus is breaking down.”

I think a big piece of this is short-form content. TikTok and other short-form content really make it key to get things put in front of your face in the quickest and most entertaining way. They prioritize shorter videos that are usually below a minute long. In addition, creators put flashy graphics or gameplay on the screen to distract the viewer and make them not want to scroll. And if all of this wasn’t enough, you could hold down on the side of your phone to make the content run at 2 times speed. All of these things combined are really rotting our brains and ruining our attention spans.

In addition, other social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat have all released their own versions of TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and Spotlight, respectively. Wherever you go on the internet, there are short-form videos you can watch that have the goal is to locking you into doomscrolling. Social media platforms want to keep your eyes on their platform as long as they can, so having addictive content is good for this goal. Having people be able to doomscroll is exactly what they want, as they lose a sense of time, and the videos are right there for them to access. Stolen Focus bluntly says, “The truth is that our attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.”

I think the solution to this is to embrace this content. As counterproductive as that sounds, I think lessening or even banning it will just make people want it even more. Being able to take important things and make them more efficient to fit the worsen attention spans can make everything quicker overall. After we have made things more efficient, we could potentially have room to grow our attention spans, as we have the time to stop and smell the roses. I feel like this idea needs to be explained and studied, but the idea of taking things that are a while and making them more tolerable would be good overall.

Being able to adapt to the way our brains are now instead of trying to mold them into how they are “supposed to be” seems much easier and more beneficial to everyone involved. There are so many things that can adapt to this new style that haven’t been updated in decades. Being able to take something old and morph it into something new is a very crucial tool and will overall help our attention spans in the long run.

As this is coming to a close, I think it is important to be able to sit down and lock into something. Something that works in my brain is once you get interested in something, the wave a motivation will just come to you. That seems like an important lesson to take away from this and is a great way to help with the attention span issue.