Jeff Daniels Quotes

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

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 am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

The kids are fixing their eyes on social media, and the stories they're looking at may not be the most important things. I'm guilty of that, too. Do you want to look at Instagram or the news? It's a difficult, and weird, situation.

The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!

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

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?

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

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

We're looking at dozens, sometimes hundreds of things every day in articles, videos, and we never look at them again. Even if we do like them, even if we tweet them out to all of our followers on Twitter, we don't return to it.

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.

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

Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.

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.

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.

Teenagers talk about the idea of having each other's 'full attention.' They grew up in a culture of distraction. They remember their parents were on cell phones when they were pushed on swings as toddlers. Now, their parents text at the dinner table and don't look up from their BlackBerry when they come for end-of-school day pickup.

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.

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

According to USA today, the average length of an attention span of a man in America is 23 minutes.

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

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.

Our attention spans have been reduced by the immediate gratification provided by smartphones and social media.

I don't get Twitter or social media. I really don't understand it or read it. I see it as a distraction.

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