Bill Griffith Quotes

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

We live in an age of sound bites and buzz words.

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.

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

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

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

We are all amateur attention economists, hoarding and bartering our moments - or watching them slip away down the cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.

We're all posting and clicking and sharing, but we're not devoting enough attention to get anything meaningful from it all.

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

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

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.

The generation we live in, we're constantly entertained - we turn our heads this way, and there's something else to entertain us. Sitting down in one seat for two hours may not be enough anymore.

The whole Twitter phenomenon is really indicative of what's happening in this country. And I say this in condemnation of myself as much as anyone else - we are growing into a nation that has no time, desire or capacity for truth. All we can handle is 140 characters of knowledge.

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 often think of it this way: The 21st century is going to be a war on the attention of humanity. Where civilization focuses its attention, I mean, that's what defines what the civilization cares about.

Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.

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

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.

Everyone has a really short attention span, and you have to bombard them with content, content, content.

I like Twitter because I'm a creature of the short-attention span theater. I can get a lot of sports opinions and other things and Twitter tells me what time it is, but not how to make the watch.

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

The phone's never far away. The TV's always on. We are constantly on the news cycle; either watching the news, making the news, talking about the news.

Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story. Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives - particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the 'ends-justify-the-means' traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values.

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