Recent studies consistently report that the average attention span of GenZ has declined to just 8 seconds, an estimated 4 seconds shorter than millennials. The average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds, meaning that the teens of today have a shorter attention span than that of a goldfish.
Since the mobile revolution around the year 2000, studies have been conducted to record the decline in human comprehension and attention spans. This research shows that the toll screens take on our brains may be greater than we thought.
This research is consistent with lived experiences in both social and school settings. Socially, GenZ has grown up with phones and social media for most of their lives. As a result of this, they are at risk of being less engaged with their peers.
Max Ruback, a sophomore at Westside High School, has seen this play out in his personal experience.
“If [you’re] with someone and they’re sitting on their phone, they are not paying as much attention …[or] actually physically interacting with people,” Ruback said.
In schools, this has an especially profound impact. Phones being in the learning environment takes away from students’ focus and creates distractions. Westside’s “bell-to-bell no cell” policy has helped somewhat and has created some changes to this ethic.
“Keeping the phones in the shoe holder helps remove the distraction of notifications. You don’t hear or feel your phone go off, and you’re also not tempted to look at it because your phone isn’t within your reach. When you aren’t worried about the notifications you’re getting, you’re able to pay more attention to what’s going on in class” Westside High School English Teacher Alexandria Larson said. “Hopefully, this helps create less dependence on phones and helps build focus for those 37 minutes.”
Even with efforts to minimize phones in the classroom, as a teacher, Ms. Larson notices differences in attention spans compared to her time in high school.
“Cell phones were a distraction at [my] high school for sure, but [we] didn’t have social media and other stuff on our phones at the time. You would get distracted by texts, but they weren’t as frequent as how often students’ phones go off now, so it wasn’t as big of a distraction as it is now,” She said.
Ms. Larson offers advice to students trying to control the distractions of screens and media.
“Staying focused isn’t just about determination because screens are designed to distract you. You have to create boundaries, like putting your phone in another room, studying in short bursts, and using screen time limits. If you build habits that make focus easier and reward yourself with screen time after, you’ll train your brain to stay focused and be more productive,” Larson said.
Herbert Simon is an American social scientist and Nobel laureate who believes that an abundance of information can be harmful to modern society.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” Simon said.
The challenge for future generations will be finding a balance between technology’s advantages and distractions.
