Tom Stoppard Quotes

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

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

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.

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

I'm not suggesting that the entire nation can't be successful, but there's something to it when you have 150 cable channels and the Internet at your fingertips and video games and all kinds of ADD-addled devices like my iPhone and your BlackBerry and things that keep us busy.

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.

We live in such an age of chatter and distraction. Everything is a challenge for the ears and eyes.

These days you're not just competing with the tedium, you're competing with the cellphone.

I have the attention span of a mosquito from multitasking and all the things that have affected my poor little brain.

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

I love the web, but man, I look at my browser, and there are, like, twenty tabs up there, all jostling for space and time, all framed by a mosaic of other apps, other work, other entertainment... so even when I really am paying attention to something on the web, there's this peripheral haze.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

We're living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

I do all my shopping on the Web. I do much of my research online. I have a blog, too. It is definitely a distraction. It is definitely a blessing. What blessing isn't a distraction, though?

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

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.

Remember daydreams? No, of course you don't. How could you? Three new text messages have just arrived, and another three, in a moment, will go out.

I have a choice - I can either watch all the dailies, or I can follow the social media. I can't do both.

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

[…] 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.

With all the abundance we have of computers and computing, what is scarce is human attention and time.

We've lost the ability to immerse ourselves in things.

Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.

Everyone has a really short attention span nowadays with social media, our phones. Even me - I can't go without touching my phone every five minutes.