GoKawiilMark is worried that things are only getting worse. The title of our session was “Have we lost control of our brains?” Unfortunately, Mark told me, the answer is yes.
Around two decades ago, Mark started wondering about how our use of devices might affect our attention spans. She set up what she calls “living laboratories,” using sensors and trackers to monitor adult volunteers’ attention, mood, and behavior when they were using devices.
In 2003, she found that the average user had an attention span of around two and a half minutes. That’s how long people could spend focused on one thing before moving on to something else. “That surprised me at the time,” she told me during our session on Wednesday. “I thought: Wow, this is really short.”
But when she repeated the experiment in 2012, she found that attention spans had shrunk—all the way down to around 75 seconds on average, she said. In research she conducted between 2014 and 2020, attention spans shrank further still—to a mere 47 seconds, on average. Yikes.
And it’s not good for us. Mark told me that she’s found switching our attention so frequently is stressful. “We would have people wear heart rate monitors, and … we would see direct correlation between switching attention fast and stress going up,” she told me.
All this distraction makes it harder for us to get stuff done, too. “It just takes longer to do any single task if you’re switching your attention,” she told me. “It’s not great for performance. It’s not great for our emotional well-being.”
And that’s for adults. What about the effects of digital technologies on children? A few months ago, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Google’s YouTube were ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to a 20-year-old woman who had accused the companies of creating products that led her to develop a childhood addiction.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Meta settled another lawsuit, this one brought by a rural school district in Kentucky. The district had also accused the company of designing addictive products that were harmful to students and had sought more than $60 million to cover the costs of their mental-health needs. Around 1,200 other school districts are taking similar legal action against social media companies.