Mark Stoller and his wife, Andra, moved to Falcon with their family in 2007. Both are U.S. Air Force veterans and enjoy life with their daughters, extended family and adopted rescue dogs in Latigo. Mark is fortunate to have his wife and daughters as his muse for topics, people to meet and places to investigate.
The dumbing down
By Mark Stoller
If you have read my columns over time, you’ll remember I am a huge skeptic of the unfortunate, necessary evil — smart phones, aka the idiot box.
While talking with my oldest daughter the other day, she told me that Netflix has instructed its writers to dumb down the plot of their shows and movies. This new direction is meant to accommodate the split attention spans of their viewers who are on their phones while watching Netflix simultaneously.
In what some might describe as the dumbing down of entertainment, shows are choosing more simple, less complex plots, along with regular spoken recaps of what has happened so far to keep the attention of absent-minded viewers, according to The Guardian.
There are claims made by “Family Ties” writer Justine Bateman in The Hollywood Reporter, “The need for streaming shows to cater to scrollers is now so great that show runners are frequently told ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’” In other words, this show cannot be casually watched in the background while a person endlessly scrolls their social media feed.
Justine claimed that this is, by default, going to stop writers from creating their best work because they are being forced to cater to an audience that’s constantly distracted.
Over the past two decades, smartphones, social media feeds, push notifications and algorithms designed to feed you as much of the content as you can enjoy on social media have rewired the attentional landscape for billions of people.
The average human attention span on a screen has collapsed to just 47 seconds-down from two-and-a-half minutes in 2004. Americans now check their phones 205 times a day, workers face 275 interruptions during every workday, and a landmark meta-analysis of nearly 100,000 participants has linked short-form video use to measurably poorer attention and self-control. The data clearly demonstrates that our capacity for sustained focus is eroding in real time.
According to Speakwiseapp.com, everyone who has tried to write a report while text messages ping, emails arrive and their phone buzzes already knows that sustained focus has become nearly impossible. The data reveals a feedback loop that is extraordinarily difficult to escape. Shortened attention spans make us more susceptible to notifications, which further fragment our attention, which makes us more reliant on quick digital stimuli, which further shortens our attention spans.
The consequences are visible everywhere: in classrooms where students cannot sustain focus through a lecture, in workplaces where concentrated, productive work has become nearly impossible and in personal lives where people struggle to finish a book, watch a movie without scrolling or hold a conversation without glancing at a screen.
The question is no longer whether digital technology affects attention. The question is how much damage has already been done, and whether the trajectory can be reversed.
The only way to affect change and turn this around is to start at the individual level. Leave your phone in another room and choose a literary classic book to read during the day or evening.
There was a story about a 300-plus group of people in Amsterdam who meet at one of the large Catholic churches, checked their phones at the door, and then spent the next three hours reading a book, playing games or talking with others.
Once you know you can have self-control and no fear of missing out, invite friends and family to join you in phone/digital free time.
Artificial Intelligence is going to make sweeping changes to ease human existence. Keep your brain sharp, and hopefully we can avoid the SkyNet robot takeover from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie, The Terminator.
