Failing focus
[Editor’s note: Our archives contain several years of excellent articles, most of which remain relevant and important to today’s young people and the adults who work with them. This one is a “Director’s Choice” that we are reposting this week.]
A few weeks ago, I deleted TikTok. I didn’t make this choice because I was worried about the app stealing my data or how much time I was spending on it (although it was a lot). Instead, I realized that my ability to focus on things for more than a minute or two had been impaired, and I was finding it difficult to sit and do assignments, listen to professors and engage in longer conversations.
The average TikTok video is 32.4 seconds and the average TikTok user scrolls the app for 90 minutes a day, which means that they are watching 180 videos a day and upwards of 1,260 videos a week. This estimate is on the conservative side, assuming that people are watching videos for the whole duration.
This realization led me to reflect on all the other things I did in my life that took about this much time. The average song released in 2020 was three minutes and 17 seconds long, and the average song length has been decreasing for two decades. Listening to music follows the same format of TikTok, with constantly switching entertainment. Opening Snapchat entails about two minutes or so of replying to some snaps and checking stories, then closing the app. Reading a text or email breaks us away from what we are doing, like listening to someone or reading or writing something important. As dining in restaurants is a much longer affair, it has been overtaken in favor of takeout and fast food. Watching television, something that used to be the ultimate attention drain, now requires a second task like phone usage for 79% of young adults. Attention spans are becoming shorter, and with that comes a shift towards shorter tasks and more frequent distractions.
Generation Z is the most susceptible group to the epidemic of shortening attention spans, primarily due to social media platforms. While the shortened duration of media forms has led to worse attention spans, media is also adapting to be shorter to adjust to the worse spans, thus continuing the cycle.
Neurologically, when we constantly engage with this form of media, two things can happen. First, when we try to multitask by interacting with many types of media at once, our brain can experience cognitive overload, which is when we try to process too much information, resulting in inability to process any of it. Second, social media algorithms use a dopamine feedback loop to take advantage of the way the dopamine center functions in your brain, keeping you “addicted” to the cycle of scrolling through media.
A 10-year study reflects the effect this has on us and on our brains. In 2004, the average time a person focused on a screen without getting distracted was about two and half minutes. In 2012, it was down to 75 seconds. In 2023, that number had decreased to 45 seconds, less than one-third of what it was in 2004. We can see that excessive TikTok users are more susceptible to distractions and distracting thoughts, a harmful trait in academic and professional environments.
So what can be done about the decline in focus? . . . read more
Claudia Flynn is a student at the University of Michigan. This article was originally published in The Michigan Daily and is posted here with permission from Claudia Flynn.
Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.