Terry Sarten: Attention spans are dwindling, will you read to the end?

ATTENTION: Goldfish short term memory is a myth - a joke to be enjoyed rather than an actual fact. PHOTO / SUPPLIED

Recent work on a social media project with mighty man Jay was something of an eye opener.

The initial script was three minutes long. No way people will watch that long was the response. He would know being something of an ace at short video clips.

Tracking shows they are viewed for about 30 seconds then you have lost the viewer to something else interesting.

This was stunning news. After the initial shock it was back to the script to cut it back to around half a minute. With some quick but brutal editing this worked but the after effects of this experience have echoed on in surprising ways.

It raised questions about my own use of the internet. I scan a few international newspapers regularly and noted that most stories came in at around 200 words. This seems to be partly linked to the old journalism notion of get 'em with the headline, hold 'em the first paragraph and then hope they are still with you when you reach the detail.

While this adage remains as true as ever most news stories now appear to have shrunk in the editing wash to a fraction of their usual dimensions. NB: this column is usually often almost exactly approximately 600 words, give or take the irony loading.

Let me now check in with you Dear Reader to see if you are still here? Hello - if you are still here then let me tell you about recent headlines suggesting that human attention spans, while once at 12 seconds, apparently are now down to 8 seconds and counting – falling behind that of goldfish.

Immediately reinforcing this notion – after 30 secs people lost interest and did not follow up on where this information came from to see if was worthy of more attention. The sources did not actually define what was meant by attention span and the whole goldfish short term memory thing is a myth – a joke to be enjoyed rather than an actual fact.

There is well founded research that does show internet users spend less than one minute on an average website before moving on to the next thing. This fits with the 30 second video clip but does not equate to the way we invest attention on other mediums as time-on-task varies depending on the task.

The ideal public speaking attention holding time is around 20 minutes. Most TED talks are 18 minutes long for a good reason with a maximum of 2 or 3 critical talking points.

This fits well with the what is called selective sustained attention or focused attention of between 10 – 20 minutes.

Now at a column word count of 476 are you still with me? You may have got bored by now and wondered off to feed the cat or annoy your children but this column is patient and can wait for you to come back to see how it will end.

All this pondering of attention spans has resulted in a personal resolution to cut back on reading non-fiction and online newspapers and start delving into novels again. I have started out as I intend to go on having read two already this year. Why you may ask? Well thanks for paying attention – the reason is I seemed to be losing touch with my imagination as evidenced by the current struggle to find lyrical ideas for new songs.

The melodies are queuing up like buses on a rainy day with no passengers waiting for a ride. Thanks for traveling with me to the 600th word of this column.

Terry Sarten (aka Tel) is a writer, musician and social worker with a very long short-term memory.