A website has 10 seconds to load. If it has not done so within this time limit, there isa 123% greater chance that the user will leave the page Tik Tok, the giant that has 1218 million monthly active users according to Statista, originally allowed videos to be posted for only 15 seconds. They were right: to achieve virality, the average is to post content between 7 and 15 seconds, as explained in a report by We Are Social.
“Abundance of information leads to poverty of attention”, theorised Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in the 1970s. The attention economy is a concept that, in economic terms, analyses attention as a scarce and valuable resource. In the 21st century, with the social acceleration of the digital age, the issues surrounding attention – and patience – take on special relevance, and even more so for the generation of digital natives.
Between multi screen and multitasking
TheInstituto de la Juventud (Injuve), indicates that “the attention spans of Zs are shorter; eight seconds is the average time that young people pay full attention to something specific”. An excess of stimuli in the world of infinite scrolling, mixed with infoxication – information overload – means that centennials live under a collapse of inputs, and that this has modified certain neurological patterns: “Their brains have evolved to process information at faster speeds and are cognitively more agile to handle mental challenges”, adds the Injuve study.
Multiscreen and multitasking, gene z is the gene of mental acrobatics: they tend to have several devices open at the same time and be engaged in different activities – for example, watching a film on their computer while chatting on their smartphone, which means their attention is scattered across several elements. At the same time, they have had to develop a filter capable of discerning at a glance what interests them and what doesn’t. “The brain can only produce one or two thoughts,” explains Earl Miller a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in The Guardian. He points out that teenagers think they can handle six at the same time, which is actually “putting the brain on a juggling act”.
Speed watching: symptom, cause, and consequence all at the same time
The wheel of acceleration feeds back, and in the society of haste, anything becomes susceptible to being devoured as soon as possible. A generalised social anxiety, a permanent feeling of missing out on something, and the resulting information binge. In 2010 YouTube, the platform on which the “youtuber” phenomenon – the precursor of today’s influencers and content creators – proliferated, introduced the option of speeding up the viewing of its videos. This option allows you to watch in 5 minutes something that originally lasted 10. Subsequently, others such as Netflix and Amazon Prime incorporated this function, but this is not only limited to content consumption, it also applies to personal life: even WhatsApp has joined the trend and you can listen to the audios you receive in accelerated mode.
The speedwatching is not only a consequence of a collective wandering attention span and obsession with time productivity, but also the most visible result of FOMO (fear of missing out). “The FOMO phenomenon is understood as the fear of being absent,” says the addiction treatment centre Orbium.. They explain that “it acts in such a way on the person that they start to use digital platforms excessively, driven by the fear of being excluded and missing out on experiences”.
The reward circuit at Formula 1 pace
Watching accelerated content allows you to see more content in less time, but just because a torrent of information enters doesn’t mean it is retained. While it would be logical to think that consuming something at accelerated speed requires more attention, what happens is that the brain becomes lazier. To alter the narrative rhythm of what is consumed requires practice, at the same time, being subjected to speedwatching makes the wheel turn faster and faster: “the constant search for new stimuli activates the neurotransmitter called dopamine, creating reward circuits and generating a vicious circle”, quotes an article by InCom UABThe culture of immediacy affects the whole of society, and both adults and young people may be tempted to watch a fast-paced video, or to leave a website if it has not loaded in ten seconds. However, the emphasis of this dynamic in young people – and teenagers especially – is also in their learning stage. Retaining in memory the characteristic of a stimulus for a period of several seconds, in order to contrast it with that of another stimulus, is a cognitive task that requires effort. Dopamine plays an essential role in this process, according to a UAM study. . Therefore, speeding up the process through instant and accelerated gratification is closely related to the ability to retain information (and thus to attention).
