Capturing the nation’s attention
President Obama’s speech to school children this week has been in the headlines for nearly five days. One could argue it stayed in the news as long as it did because holiday weekends are traditionally slow news wise. Regardless, now that the speech has passed with little to no controversy, Americans will turn their attention elsewhere. Why? According to ChaCha the average adult attention span is far less than five days.
It’s only 20 minutes. That actually was longer than I expected.
David Meyer, an expert on the attention span of the human brain at the University of Michigan was quoted in New York Magazine about his own battle with distraction. “I could spend my whole day, my whole night, just answering e-mails. I just can’t deal with it all. None of this happened even ten years ago. It was a lot calmer. There was a lot of opportunity for getting steady work done.”
(I feel your pain, David. Some days when I am exhausted from catching up on my RSS feeds, sorting through e-mails and checking my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn statuses and groups, I still don’t feel like I did anything.)
The article went on to talk about the pros and cons of overstimulation and how our brains will have to “inevitably change to deal with more information” but I can’t really tell you much more. The online article was eight pages! You can’t expect me to click through an eight-page article without getting distracted, can you?
Politicians and celebrities in particular know how to both work within this shortened attention span and use it to their advantage. If our brains are morphing, Darwin-like, to pay attention to a lot of little things on the surface level, it becomes more important to know how to speak in sounds bites, as they say. That’s the art of crafting the message.
It still pays to understand your subject beyond mere talking points, however. People do still dig deeper and search out more information, especially on subjects they are passionate about. They also want to interact and exchange information in person. When asked, 87% of adults in a recent survey say they prefer to deal with people in person instead of via computers or smartphones. I’m one of those people. I like to see a person’s eyes and read their body language to really feel like I’ve connected.
Maybe that’s what President Obama wanted to accomplish with the nation’s school kids. He spoke for 15 minutes, well within the average attention span, and stayed true to a message of staying in school and staying motivated. Yes, the speech was on TV, but he also spoke in front of an audience, instead of in an e-mail or via podcast, and had the speech broadcast live to students. Did he connect? It depends on who you ask. That is, if you can still get their attention.
