Quotes & Sayings About Attention Spans

Let's think back for a moment to the boring sermon. Sometimes the sermon we hear is boring because it went on for too long (or it was not long enough) to engage the listeners. One of the most culturally sensitive areas of human life is this area of time. What various people and cultures consider "late" and "too long" varies widely. In the United States, African-American and Hispanic Christians have services in which singing, prayer, and preaching go on at least 50 percent longer than the attention spans and comfort zones of most Anglo people. Anyone who leads worship services will, then, unavoidably be contextualizing toward some people and away from others. — Timothy Keller

People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water. — David Bowie

Developers have the attention spans of slightly moronic woodland creatures. — Linus Torvalds

I almost feel like if I didn't have the gallery and museum content it would be easy to get lost. People's attention spans are so short; they see something and it trends for a few days and then it goes away and something else comes. — Kalup Linzy

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

Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters. — Cressida Cowell

The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

Twenty20 is cricket on speed. In an era of hectic lifestyles and falling attention spans, it gives spectators more drama and intensity in three hours that they would get from a whole-day match. And even though it is a heady cocktail of money, entertainment and media, at its core it is cricket. — Vikas Swarup

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further. — Daniel H. Pink

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

An ambitious, paradoxical world we live in -
of short attention spans
paired with the massive fear
of being forgotten too soon. — Sreesha Divakaran

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. — Jim Lampley

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. — Athol Fugard

There's time limits on how long people's attention spans will work. There's six weeks in each territory that you're really famous, then you, thank god, disappear again. — Sia Furler

Standing out from the crowd is the only way to guarantee your message is received in a culture that is increasingly distracted and where attention spans are plummeting. — Dave Burgess

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.' — Bill Cosby

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? — Lorde

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

People's attentions spans are getting shorter and shorter. I don't want to cater to that necessarily but, just for myself, it feels like more than 40 minutes of music is too much. — Phil Elvrum

We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground ...
Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments. — Wes Jackson

I think kids who have music in their lives are more focused. They have better attention spans. They excel more in their studies. They have a better sense of self-esteem and self-worth. — Ingrid Michaelson

Cats would rule the world if they had longer attention spans. — Arthur D. Hlavaty

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very week identity. — Marshall McLuhan

Attention spans are shrinking on a daily basis, and it's getting harder to make an impression that lasts. So the fact that we were able to make a mark in a way that led to the continued relevance of the record is kind of crazy. I'm in awe of that. — Sam Fogarino

Players' attention spans get less and less as they progress. — Mike Krzyzewski

Mid-grade readers don't have short attention spans, they just have low boredom tolerance. — Judith Viorst

In '77 there was no Internet, there was no Twitter or Facebook, and I think that, without being some old git who hates anything new, people's attention spans are too short. Back then you had 'Top Of The Pops' and 'Melody Maker,' and you had to make the effort to go to a show so that you absorbed the culture of music. — Steve Jones

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

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have before the internet. It's sort of a blog for people with attention spans. — Stephen Colbert

Poetry of all the forms of literature I think is the most suited for the digital age and for the shorter attention spans and all of that. It Twitters very easily, some lyric poems and it's very easy to zip a poem to someone, so that's one of the things I think is wonderful about poetry in the digital age. — Rita Dove

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. — Ian Anderson

Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy. — Jeff VanderMeer

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

It's a double-headed coin, because technology is a convenience but it's stifled our attention spans. At one time, albums had songs that were like ten minutes long, with different variations and chord progressions and changes. — Cee Lo Green

It's not our fault our generation has short attention spans, Dad. We watch an appalling amount of TV. — Yeardley Smith

Hopefully, at some point, people will at least credit the Republicans with carrying out their oversight responsibilities and with pursuing a principled course of action even in the face of everyone's short-attention spans. — Barbara Olson

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles - books, in short, that are as much like 'Angry Birds' as possible. But I think that's a terrible idea. — John Green

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans. — Barbara Kruger

I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes. — Peter Bradley Adams

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. — Barbara Kruger

We're not cognitively equipped to deal with it. And it's becoming a problem, frankly. It's part of the reason why I quit Facebook. We all hear these things and read reports about how our attention spans are shrinking. It makes me wonder about the generation growing up now, how it will affect their brain development. — Ron Currie Jr.

In this fragmented world, with such short attention spans, you've got a couple of episodes to make an impression. And if you don't, you start to lose your audience in a big way. — David Walton

It true, Bigfoot career been in hole lately. Bigfoot mania of the '70's and '80's but distant memory. I famous for ability to not be see but don't think I not notice you not notice. I blame music television and internet. People too lazy and stupid to appreciate conceptual artist like Bigfoot who appeal is absence. — Graham Roumieu

Demigods today. I blame social media for their short attention spans. When you can't even take the time to listen to a god hold forth, that's just sad. — Rick Riordan

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

I get a little cranky with the whole business about kids not having attention spans. This reminds me of the usual business of thinking that the next generation is hopeless. Every generation has said that about every younger generation. — Robin McKinley

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. — Andrew Weil

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. — Alexis Ohanian

Land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans, nothing is savored long enough to really understand. — Joni Mitchell

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

Television is the most insidious form of escape known to man. It is the leading medication in the production of catatonia, cutting attention spans down to nothing, and as result will gut the sales of this book. And nobody gives a rat's ass because everyone's catatonic. — Tommy Walker