Attention Spans 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.

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

People who lived in the 1920s and '30s and '40s were not so different from us. In some ways, they were probably better citizens than we are. They had longer attention spans, for example. Educated people tended to read a bit more than we did.

Becoming a father allowed me to become a much better composer, because it allowed me to have tremendous patience. I have much more tolerance for opposing opinions, short attention spans, changes of heart. And faith in the future.

I think people are really desperate for conversations. I'm really fascinated by the idea that at the same time, the internet is sort of expunging our attention spans.

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

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

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.

I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. I'm 17 now: what happens by the time I'm 21, am I a burn-out or something? Will they still listen to my record?

The problems with kids having short attention spans is driven by entertainment, reset buttons on games, games having to do with getting somewhere and heads blowing up. Everything is 'cut to the chase, cut to the chase.'

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

I know everyone says attention spans are shorter now, and if you can't get them in the first 20 seconds, you lost them. But I honestly believe if you give someone something worth slowing down to really pay attention to, they will.

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

I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.

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

The media, the polls and our legislatures fortunately have short attention spans.

With television, attention spans have been shortened. It's something we have to fight against: the dumbing down of the audience. To be part of an audience is a privilege. To be with the people on stage, to let them reach you. If you're doing a million other things, they won't reach you.

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.

People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.

Gaming is our cultural bogeyman - we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.

I think there was a sense that the impact was being lost because the audience was so familiar with the form. You combine that with people's attention spans, which are clearly conditioned to be shorter now, and there's a need to vary the paradigm.

To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.

It kind of renews my faith in humankind that there's long attention spans left out there that can listen to a 12-minute song.

With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.