Last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported a huge ten-year decline in reading, math, and science performance among fifteen-year-olds globally, a third of whom cited digital distraction as an issue. (View Highlight)
Film pacing has accelerated, with the average length of a shot decreasing; in music, the mean length of top-performing pop songs declined by more than a minute between 1990 and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by the psychologist Gloria Mark found that participants kept their attention on a single screen for an average of two and a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. These days, she writes, people can pay attention to one screen for an average of only forty-seven seconds (View Highlight)
For decades, what was going on between an advertisement and its viewers was unclear: there was no consensus about what attention was or how to quantify it. “The difference now is that there’s better tech to measure it,” Leong said. (View Highlight)
There are companies that use eye tracking. There are companies that do facial coding”—reading emotions through micro-expressions. “It’s no longer a matter of convincing clients that this is something they should lean into—it’s how.” (View Highlight)
Desde la teoría de la emoción construida, esto es un error.
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At Dentsu, as elsewhere, the aim has become to get more from these shrinking slivers—an endeavor some outsiders liken to fracking, the process used to force lingering pockets of fossil fuels out of the earth. When I asked whether these efforts would dissipate people’s focus further, Castle said that optimizing would result in ads being even more precisely tailored to entice their audiences. “As attention measurement matures, things will fall by the wayside and we can eliminate some of the waste,” she said. (View Highlight)
Fracking sobre la atención es una súper buena imagen, aunque da miedo pensar hacia dónde coevolucionaremos con una industria que busca apretar nuestros botones de la forma más directa y eficiente posible. Nos convertiremos en seres burdos.
The legal scholar Tim Wu, in his book “The Attention Merchants,” notes, “Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and any time.” No wonder young people struggle. Burnett, in an opinion piece that he co-wrote in the Times last fall, argued that schools, rather than just expecting students to pay attention, should teach them how. (View Highlight)