It is not news to our society that we are exposed to tons of thousands of advertisements per day. And I think it's safe to say that we don't notice or pay attention to every advertisement we see...but is this really because of the amount of advertisements we're daily bombarded with? Is the abundance of advertisements were exposed to cause our attention spans to shorten? Or are certain advertisements just not striking enough for us, causing us to mute them out?
It has been said that the average attention span in the past ten years has dropped from 12 minutes to 5 minutes. As a person who struggles to pay attention to things for more than 10 minutes, I definitely agree with this statistic. But, do I feel that advertising specifically affects the attention span of our society? Hm...not exactly.
I think there is more to blame than advertising. I believe that social media, more than anything, has a much bigger effect on our attention span. We are constantly connected to the web, whether it be by cellphones, laptops, tablets, etc, we are always distracted by something other than what is going on around us. I myself, have noticed a major change with my attention span, due to the different social media outlets that are available to us. I find it extremely difficult to concentrate on the task that I need to get done, without tuning out and getting distracted by some sort of social media website. I think it's safe to say that we all check either our e-mail, text messages, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc, at least once every few hours.
"Growing evidence shows that social media, among other Internet-age phenomena, is actually rewiring our brains, creating shorter attention spans than ever before. Depending on what you believe, it may also be making us stupid and/or causing the end of the golden age of blogging."
What I'm really trying to get across here is that I think that all these social media outlets, and these mobile devices, have really caused our generation to tune ourselves out to a lot of things that were once more appreciated in life. Even in simple conversations with friends, I find myself, and others, tuning out what other individuals are saying to us, as we are distracted by text messages, or social media sites on our mobile phone. I think that social media has a huge impact on how much time we give to certain things. With advertising, we most likely won't pay attention to an advertisement unless we find it relevant to our life or interests. And because of this, the advertisement industry really needs to push it's amount of campaigns published, in order to make us pay attention. They constantly need to come up with more compelling and dynamic ideas to make us stop, and actually take our time to appreciate, and absorb them.
On the web, we also are exposed to tons of advertisements. But, we are so used to them being there, that we normally just tune them our of our mind. Unless the advertisement pertains to our interest, we normally don't care for them. Even with pop up advertisements, we are so accustomed to them appearing on our screen, that we normally don't care what they have to say, and we just exit them to continue on with whatever else we were doing. Because of this lack of attention we give to advertisements now, there needs to be a larger abundance of them in order for us to acknowledge what they're trying to sell/tell us.
Overall, I feel that advertising is becoming less appreciated due to the fact that we're all so attached to our mobile devices & social media outlets. We're constantly planting our faces into our phones, rather than enjoying and appreciate the things around us. I feel that the amount of advertisements that brands produce is going to need to get higher & more dynamic, in order for future generations to pay attention seeing as social media & technology is only expanding more and more.
I found this neat/intersting infographic on the topic of social media & attention spans: Click here to see!
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