Our attention spans are plummeting! What the hell is wrong with us?

There has been a 33% reduction in the average human attention span since 2000. It is now significantly less than a goldfish, writes Fergus Finlay

What the hell is wrong with us? It’s the sort of question George Hook might ask, especially in one of his grumpy moods.

I was listening to him having a right old rant the other day about how we’ve all lost the ability to read and write, because of our reliance on technology.

Over the top, I thought. Technology is good, technology is enabling more communication not less.

Every Tuesday morning I post this column on Facebook and Twitter, and I’m always amazed at the conversations it starts.

They start by people reacting to what I’ve written, then other people react to the people who reacted first, and sometimes it can head off into a day-long argument about something totally different altogether.

It can be fascinating to watch – a bit like a debate in the pub that started with a discussion of how badly Munster are playing these days and ends in an argument about Irish neutrality or some such.

You’ll get the odd bit of abuse, of course, but that goes with the territory.

I’m always amazed at the people who believe I should never express an opinion at all, because I was once very active in politics and am still (openly!) a member of a political party.

But we’re all, as citizens, entitled to our views.

This platform, which allows you the luxury of 1,200 words to try to develop an argument, is the best of them all.

Twitter and Facebook simply can’t compete with the newspapers when it comes to a decent level of discourse.

But they’re still brilliant for encouraging people to read, and of course they have an immediacy when it comes to breaking news that we’ve never had before.

So is George wrong? Should we be telling everyone to ignore him when it comes to putting away the technology and taking up a pen to write notes and letters?

Well, I was at a lunch last week that was sponsored by an outfit called Core Knowledge. I probably should have heard of them before, but hadn’t.

It’s a training agency, part of a much bigger media group, that runs courses for people in the marketing and communications business.

They had put a little gift on the table in front of each guest, called The Little Book of Knowledge, and it’s full of amazing nuggets of information.

Now, it’s not about how the world began, or whether there’s life on Mars. It’s about how Irish people think and act in their role as consumers. (Or maybe don’t think, just feel. Or maybe act without thinking.)

Twice as many of us go to the cinema every month as other Europeans. More of us still buy newspapers than anywhere else – and newspapers are the most actively purchased medium in the country still.

But the most consumed media in the country, by a long way, is radio. Typically, we listen to 3½ hours of radio a day.

That doesn’t mean we’re not becoming increasingly dependent on technology.

The average number of internet-enabled devices in Ireland is twice what it is in Germany, and more than half of us instinctively check our smartphones within five minutes of waking up.

Forgive all these statistics, but here’s some startling evidence from the Little Book of Knowledge about the increasing pervasiveness of the internet.

In every minute online – that’s every minute of every day – Facebook records more than 4 million “likes”, Twitter users send around 350,000 tweets, and Instagram users like nearly 2 million pictures.

It’s a world gone mad in some ways.

And the Little Book contains one more rather sobering fact that they attribute to the Smithsonian Institute (although I’ve seen it attributed to Microsoft, of all people, elsewhere).

There has been a 33% reduction in the average human attention span since 2000. It is now eight seconds on average – significantly less than that of a goldfish.

But we can still think.

One of the other fascinating things I was introduced to at that lunch on Friday (and they say there’s no such thing as a free lunch!) was something called Ignitescore.

Ignite are a research company whose primary interest is consumers and brands, but as part of their work they interact with others to try to find out what people are thinking about in relation to a wide range of issues.

Intriguingly, people are often ahead of politics.

Ignite ran an interesting exercise in association with thejournal.ie before the last Budget, for instance, and here’s how people wanted that budget to look.

Most of us wanted more spending and less tax cuts. We wanted the ratio to be about 60/40 in favour of investment in health, education, social protection and children.

While individual’s tax bills remain their largest single priority, the cost of childcare remains a huge pressure point for most families.

That may explain why the Government has been so disappointed that the budget was largely ignored by the people, and why it hasn’t spilled over into a warm and fuzzy glow as the election looms ever closer.

But our attention span is such nowadays that a great many warm and fuzzy glows might come and go before the election happens.

Every month, Ignite records what really mattered to us over the course of the month. In October, the Budget was the second most important story to us, after the refugee crisis and ahead of Irish tragedies like the terrible fire in Carrickmines and the murder of Garda Tony Golden.

These are hard things to forget, but there was also a scare about cancer and meat-eating that consumed a lot of our attention in October, an Irish Rail strike, the Rugby World Cup, and a spate of frightening stories about rural crime.

When Ignite publish their research into November, how many of those stories will have dropped off the list entirely, I wonder, to be replaced by anxiety about the recent flooding, coupled with (perhaps) the Paris summit on global warming.

Isis and their atrocities will no doubt be top of the list of our concerns. But all that will fade too as we start to get energised about Christmas shopping.

Our goldfish attention spans don’t just dictate the lives we lead, it seems, but also the way we think and feel. There’s something in George Hook’s rant after all.

I’ve always argued that it’s absolutely essential that we raise our kids with what the Scandinavians call a “digital instinct” – the ability to feel comfortable with all forms of technology.

We may have passed the point of comfort, and be entering into an era of dependence. And that’s frightening too.

Our educators and policy makers have to start listening to George on this issue, because we need a better balance. Not just in the way we receive information, but in the way we process it, and in our ability to think critically about it.

A capacity for critical analysis is, little by little, being replaced by the instant gratification that our smartphones and tablets offer us at the touch of a button.

I’ve written before about the need for education in media literacy, and it’s becoming more pressing all the time.

Goldfish, after all, never last very long.