Thanks Social Media – Our Average Attention Span Is Now Shorter Than Goldfish

Oops. I forgot!

2 days into our trip, I was videotaping the sunset and noticed on the date stamp on the old camcorder screen that it was October 12th – OMG I forgot it was my birthday!

How could I forget my own birthday? (Thankfully, it was mine and not my wife’s!)

Linkedin launched in June, 2003. Facebook launched in 2004. YouTube launched in 2005. Twitter in 2006. And now we also have Pinterest. And Instagram. And Snapchat. All of these mechanisms are pushing content across a world that now also sends millions of texts per second.

Our average attention span is now 8 seconds – 1 second less than a goldfish

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the average attention span of a human being has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. This is one second less than the attention span of a goldfish. That’s right, goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds – 1 second more than you and I.

To know why we do so, click here