PR professionals, like journalists, marketing professionals and other communications specialists, frequently traffic in media consumption – and there is no shortage of content. The influx of information is constant and ready for consumption, whether it’s CNN’s running news ticker on your TV screen or a scrollable list of news articles on your smartphone’s news app, or even the personal news feed on your Facebook or Twitter account.
Our 24/7 news cycle has shown that a new story is always right around the corner to occupy the public’s attention and satiate its craving for novelty. News junkies, whatever their poison – politics, crime, celebrities, sports – can always get their fix.
Sociologists, psychologists and other experts have long speculated the effects that a constant news cycle and fixation on social media have on the minds and attention spans of consumers. They’ve cautioned that a “fear of missing out” on breaking news and social media updates may lead to more fragmented public discussion and that a certain “social acceleration” – or the increasing rates of change within collective attention — is at play. But such a claim was largely hypothetical and lacked supporting empirical evidence. That is, until recently.
A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications presented findings supporting that such rates of change are occurring and narrowing our collective attention span across the domains of social media, books, movies and other media.
The study was conducted by a team of European scientists from Berlin Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, University College Cork in Ireland and Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
The team’s findings were based on studying Twitter data from 2013 to 2016, as well as books from Google Books going back the last 100 years, movie ticket sales dating back 40 years, and citations of scientific publications from the last quarter century. The studies also relied on data from Google Trends from 2010 to 2018, Reddit from 2010 to 2015, and Wikipedia from 2012-2017.
Researchers found “empirical evidence of ever-steeper gradients and shorter bursts of collective attention” attributed to each cultural item, resulting in a rapid exhaustion of limited-attention resources. To paraphrase, these cultural items rose in popularity faster than before but also fell out of it more quickly, with the researchers determining that the production of more content in less time is fatiguing our collective attention.
One example of the scientists’ findings came from a deep dive into the daily top 50 hashtags worldwide on Twitter, in which the scientists found that peaks have become steeper and more frequent. In 2013, a hashtag stayed in the top 50 for an average of 17.5 hours. In 2016, this decreased to 11.9 hours.
“The shortened peak of public interest for one topic is directly followed by the next topic, because of the fierce competition for novelty,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers found similar results for comments on Reddit and movie sales at the box office, though these results weren’t mirrored for scientific papers and Wikipedia entries.
DTU researcher Professor Sune Lehmann noted the importance of following up this study by researching beyond the effects on our collective attention and exploring how an overabundance of information affects the attention spans of individuals.
“We hope that more research in this direction will inform the way we design new communication systems, such that information quality does not suffer even when new topics appear at increasing rates,” Lehmann said.
Read the study in its entirety here.