Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People's attention spans don't run too long these days.
The media, the polls and our legislatures fortunately have short attention spans.
Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.
Our attention spans have been reduced by the immediate gratification provided by smartphones and social media.
For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.
Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
Attention spans are short. Like, eight seconds short. That's why it's necessary to grab people's attention immediately.
People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.
It kind of renews my faith in humankind that there's long attention spans left out there that can listen to a 12-minute song.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.
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.
I think people are really desperate for conversations. I'm really fascinated by the idea that at the same time, the internet is sort of expunging our attention spans.
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.
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.
Gaming is our cultural bogeyman - we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.
Attention spans are so limited and ticket prices so high. We're anyway in a business of manipulating emotions. But each film needs to be positioned truthfully so that people don't feel cheated.
Technology is causing a set of seemingly disconnected things - shortening of attention spans, polarization, outrage-ification of culture, mass narcissism, election engineering, addiction to technology.
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?
People's attention spans, first of all, aren't always long enough. You also want to not be preachy. You want to be able to try and get the good stuff, like me and Donald say, the vegetables with the chocolate.
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.'
Becoming a father allowed me to become a much better composer, because it allowed me to have tremendous patience. I have much more tolerance for opposing opinions, short attention spans, changes of heart. And faith in the future.
I know everyone says attention spans are shorter now, and if you can't get them in the first 20 seconds, you lost them. But I honestly believe if you give someone something worth slowing down to really pay attention to, they will.
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.
People who lived in the 1920s and '30s and '40s were not so different from us. In some ways, they were probably better citizens than we are. They had longer attention spans, for example. Educated people tended to read a bit more than we did.
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.
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.
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.
We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.
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.
With television, attention spans have been shortened. It's something we have to fight against: the dumbing down of the audience. To be part of an audience is a privilege. To be with the people on stage, to let them reach you. If you're doing a million other things, they won't reach you.
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.
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.
Some people like the same thing forever, but I don't know. We kind of, like, listen to loads of different stuff, and our attention spans aren't good enough. So there was a bit of frustration when you're, like, having to play the same thing all the time because we play all, like, loads of different instruments.
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.