Gen Z has been labelled the “attention deficit generation”, which is for a good reason. 

As someone who struggles with keeping their attention focused on one thing at a time, I see it in many of my classmates who create distractions or find distractions in anything to be able to stop doing their set work and take a break, whether it is good for themselves or not. With this new wave of technology coming through, there are so many more distractions available at hand for kids and it is impacting businesses all around the world.

Gen Z has transformed the way things used to be done. Businesses have had to change their whole marketing strategies to fit ads into 8 seconds. 8 seconds is the average attention span of teens these days while online, which is one second less than a goldfish’s attention span. YouTube ads are now usually 5 seconds or less to try and get their point across in a humorous or colourful way to make teens pay attention for that little bit longer. 

 ‘Microsoft Canada’ has recently conducted a study about the drop in the attention span of our digital native generation. The study shows a big contribution of the new digital life style that has risen in the last few years for the drop in attention, but has also shown that higher uses of social media increase short bursts of high attention, but as time goes on this advantage gets smaller. Overall, the study shows that this new age digital life does indeed have a negative impact on prolonged focus. That thrill of jumping from article to article or hyperlink to hyperlink shows that 19% of online viewers change what they are watching or reading in the first 10 seconds. 

Many have blamed this wave of short attention spans on social media as there is always a stimulation: one click or swipe and there is a new set of photos, comments and likes that come through. Many people cannot make it through short articles due to the ads on the side of webpages that have interesting or “clickbait” titles and colorful thumbnails. It also doesn’t help with the number of hyperlinks thrown in the middle of sentences that are just itching to be pressed. Another reason for this shorter attention span could be our quick lifestyle that has come around in the last few decades. Nowadays we do twice the amount of activities daily than many people would do years ago. We have adapted this new lifestyle where everything is fast and we take very little breaks just to be able to achieve our daily requirements which impacts our ability to be able to sit and do nothing for hours at a time and just listen to our teachers talking.

If getting through 5 hour long classes a day is hard for most teens, why aren’t things changed to help us reach our full learning potential? A book called Tools For Teaching written by Ben Davis, a chemistry professor, states that “student attention during lectures tends to wane after approximately 10-15 minutes”. We should be able to realise this problem that teens are facing and make changes to help their education like modifying lessons to have more interactive elements or just shortening lecture times to be able to make sure students are still getting all the information they need, but in a time that they can maintain focus for.

Yes, many things can be changed in our curriculum to be able to help teens reach their full potential, but we also have to do things that will help ourselves like limiting exposure to the fast paced world of the internet in our free time and doing things like meditation or mindfulness that helps to slow everything down for a bit and make you focus on yourself for 5 minutes a day.

With our new attention deficit and internet reliant age we need to realise that many things need to be changed to be able to reach our full potential at school or work. By changing these very small things, big changes could be made to the way we learn and how that shapes us later in life.