If you check the internet you will soon come up with a flurry of news items and articles explaining that the human attention span is now shorter than that of goldfish. Whereas goldfish can focus their whole attention for 9 seconds, humans can only manage 8. The figure for 2000 was 10 seconds, which is why researchers in psychology are claiming that our crazy, highly addictive use of smartphones and tablets has much to blame for attention span deficit (the smartphone-tablet revolution started more or less with the 21st century).

My own impression, allow me to digress, is that the dwindling attention span is also (or mainly) connected with the editing styles of music videos since the 1990s. When MTV started back in the 1980s music videos were often narrative, rather than performative (=showing musicians playing and singers singing), and used much longer cuts than today; in some cases they were mini-films, like John Landis’s landmark video Thriller (1983) for Michael Jackson. Today most music videos boast a convulsive editing style which seems designed to show the corresponding (female) star in as many outfits as possible; choreographies are also chopped down to the point that it is hard to say whether performers can dance at all, or for more than 3 seconds. I used to enjoy watching music videos but now I find myself unable to watch one for 3 minutes as, ironically, I get bored with so many different shots… Our attention span, as you can see, depends on each media and within these, on each text.

The editing style of music videos was transferred in the late 1990s not only to cinema (as video directors became film directors) but also to many new-style children’s cartoon series and, more recently, to the self-presentation strategies of the myriad YouTubers, who, like modern-day Hamelin players, enchant the young and are destroying TV. All–music videos, Hollywood films, cartoon series, YouTubers videos and, I’m sure, plenty of video games–affect the younger generation by shortening their general attention span, no doubt about this; at the same time, all these media must adapt their storytelling strategies to the diminishing attention span they have generated, resulting in your classic vicious circle.

Funnily, films are much longer than they used to be: 90 minutes was the classic Hollywood measure, now most films run to 120 minutes or more. At the same time, children and, above all, YA fiction is also full of very long series, beginning with the Harry Potter heptalogy. As I’m sure you, reader, have noticed, the films–and I mean here the blatantly commercial Hollywood films using genres such as SF, fantasy, superhero comics or videogames–are a messy succession of independent scenes that hardly cohere into a logical sequence, if at all. They are intended to be full of thrills to keep (young) audiences engaged but most often turn out to be as boring as any current MTV video. This is fine with film studio executives as they expect to make money in just the first two weekends, enough to fill their pockets and keep the machinery greased. However, many are commenting on this summer that this kind of expendable blockbuster is flopping hard–perhaps because older audiences, who enjoy a well-told story, are turning their back on them. The 1959 Ben-Hur remains a solid achievement whereas the 2016 version is painfully embarrassing.

Now, for the books. And teaching Literature. I learned from my experience with the Harry Potter books as a lecturer that the attention span of the very young (7 upwards) can stretch amazingly if given an exciting text. I am also learning, nonetheless, that not even Harry Potter works if the child in question rejects reading as entertainment. The young, here is my point, are divided and have always been divided into two classes: persons with a remarkable attention span (good readers, hence good students) and persons with a short attention span (poor readers, hence poor students). I’m afraid that what is fast diminishing is not the attention span of all young children but of those who do not have an inborn long attention span. Since children with a long-lasting attention span are always in the minority, and since the impact of the computer-related technologies on all the young (and not so young…) is undeniable, the current panorama is moving towards a situation in which only a few (readers) will be able to compete with the goldfish. This is tragic for humanity in general and for Literature teachers in particular, as we, needless to say, work with texts that require a very steady attention span from readers.

I’m not going to get again into the matter of why young persons who simply loathe reading register for a degree in the Humanities. I want to make the point that the resistance to reading is connected with this problem of the diminishing attention span. In the age of Twitter and the 140 characters 8 seconds are all we are willing to give up of our time and attention, both to read and to write. Here in this blog I have been gradually aiming at readers with a longer attention span: I started with 500-word posts six years ago, now I’m past the 1500 word count in most posts. For many, this will be too much, but, then, I’m not satisfied that 140 characters express anything worth considering (this is, ironically, a very good measure for insults, hence the many trolls plaguing Twitter users).

Children’s attention is scattered among the many invitations by different media to do something fun and in a short period of time. Reading seems to them time-consuming and very laborious in comparison to, for instance, watching YouTubers. As we know, the less we read, the worse our reading is: constant practice not only increases speed but also attention span. The fastest readers can read for the longest periods because they’re extremely practised in reading. Ask yourself, teacher or student: How many pages of a fiction book can you read in one hour? How many hours can you read for, non-stop? I know you’ll tell me that, no matter how experienced you are, sometimes reading a sonnet exhausts your attention span… Yes, I know. Let’s take Dickens’s Oliver Twist, which I am to start teaching next week: how much time do you need to read it? Did Dickens, incidentally, introduce serialization because he noticed that the diminishing attention span of Victorian readers required selling them stories in little bits? (Remember that in fast-paced 19th century USA readers preferred short stories to novels; Moby Dick was some freak phenomenon…). If 8 seconds is the average attention span, how do I keep students interacting with me for the 4500 seconds that a 75-minute session has? We, teachers, are told that we need to change tack every 10 minutes or so, but even 10 minutes are 600 seconds…

I have recently learned from the children in my family something else about attention span that connects with repetition and with the difficulties that many students have to summarize plots, highlight main points and establish connections. I was watching Despicable Me 2 with my youngest niece (aged 7), and she started reciting all the dialogue for each scene before it was uttered by the characters. This was my third time seeing the film, but she claims to have seen it… fourteen times. No wonder she knew the dialogue. However, when I asked her to summarize the plot (she might like to tell a friend why the film is so cool) she had no idea where to begin and simply did not manage to produce any coherent summary (which frustrated her enormously!). Typical among the kids her age, she’s good at retaining detail, even at memorizing many favourite bits, but not so good at understanding and building logical sequence. Repetition is, for that reason, always a pleasure, for whereas it irks us, adults who can recall plot, it offers children every time a renewed pleasure which is not spoiled by the anticipation of the known bits, quite the opposite.

In this sense, films are necessarily far more pleasurable than reading since they are narrated to a quite passive spectator. This is similar to the typical situation in which children unable to read on their own ask their parents to read them the same story again and again and again. Trouble begins when we tell children to start reading alone and take an active role. Some love it (fewer and fewer…) and most hate it (their numbers are increasing). The Setmana del Llibre en Català recently announced that sales for children’s books in Catalonia have diminished by 3% in the last year, which means that we, adults, are buying fewer books for children because they reject them. Nobody knows what makes some children connect with reading; you may raise two kids in exactly the same way and one will turn out to be a reader and the other won’t. Surely, it must be some kind of neurobiological predisposition attached to the pleasure centres of the brain which happens to be activated by consuming printed type. If the other children lack this predisposition, then there is nothing any reading programme can do for them–unless we start considering genetic engineering. I worry, not only as a Literature teacher but also as a plain citizen concerned about the future, for no culture can survive without passing on its knowledge in writing. If you don’t love Literature, fancy loving mechanical handbooks…

Finally, allow me to use a few lines to consider retentive memory, for perhaps in the end this matters even more than attention span. I mean here specifically the ability to remember what you read, which in turn helps you both to offer coherent plot summaries and to recall books read long ago. You may have a considerable attention span and read for hours but this does not mean that your retentive memory is guaranteed. I can read Dickens for hours but I always have tremendous problems to retain his convoluted plots, which is why I need to plot summaries, either borrowed or my own. I can offer a nice plot summary of Oliver Twist because I have read it many times but I can’t do that with any of the other Dickens books I have only read once. If you’re studying or teaching Literature, then, there’s no way around this: we need to summarize the plots of the fiction and drama we read, or the main arguments for essays, non-fiction and so on. Working on your retentive memory does increase attention span for it trains you to identify the highlights in the text.

What fails when you give a book many tries but you do not manage to read is your attention span, which is absolutely flexible, never rigid, and connected with your preferences. I’m happily reading the twenty Patrick O’Brian novels but no way I could go past page fifty of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge . This is, in any case, much more than 8 seconds.

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