Tom Junod Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A modern audience is capable of processing just so much information because they're used to visual media that's on overload.

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.

I find that I can't work and listen to radio - either I find I don't like it and it distracts me, or I do like it and I want to listen to it.

I'm easily distracted by other things in the world around me.

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

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.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

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

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

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.

I think we all have really busy lives now and there's so much stimulation, there's so many artists, there's so much music, there's so much art, there's so much everything in a world it's hard to get people to focus on 12 songs of yours at once.

The conscious mind can only pay attention to about four things at once. If you've got these nagging voices in your head telling you to remember to pick up the laundry and call so-and-so, they're competing in your brain for neural resources with the stuff you're actually trying to do, like getting your work done.