Marshall McLuhan Quotes

For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.

People's attention spans don't run too long these days.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.

I think we have the attention span of a gnat. You know, with cell phones and Twitter.

It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

As a member of a generation who have been subjected to much over-stimulation, it's hard to say I fit into any one category.

We are such a sound-bite culture; people are so accustomed to flipping through their television so quickly that we only have just a few seconds to grab someone's attention.

People's attentions spans are getting shorter and shorter. I don't want to cater to that necessarily but, just for myself, it feels like more than 40 minutes of music is too much.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency.

Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.

Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

I feel like my competition is everything else that's competing for people's attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It's your kid's report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people's time.

People's minds are overloaded with information.

The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them.

Multi-tasking arises out of distraction itself.

Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.