Killian Advertising has advice for reaching post-literate Americans with ever shorter attention spans.
Welcome to the Post-Literate Era – a period which began decades ago but which has gained momentum in the 21st century. The evidence is everywhere: we can even draw the graph of sustained attention, from a 19th-century reader willing to read David Copperfield over several weeks, to long-copy magazine ads of our grandparents generation, to today’s web pages that are given 4.5 seconds to show themselves relevant.
Read down for the Resume From Hell series.
> we can even draw the graph of sustained attention
We live in an era when people will play a video game for 24 horus straight, play an entire season of John Elway Quarterback, maintain a character on WOW for years… and people want to suggest that people no longer have the capacity for sustained attention?
yeah, right.
It is telling that this “go with the flow” advice comes from an advertising firm. Advertising is all about grabbing the attention right away. Yes, some advertising works at a subtler level, but all advertising is essentially anti-intellectual and anti-artistic. Advertisers do not want you to think too much, lest you decide against buying the product. They do not want you to discriminate too much aesthetically, for similar reasons.
It is a teacher’s job to do things at once: grab the students’ attention, and entice them into the slow, sinewy material, the kind that can stretch their logic, vocabulary, syntax, and imagination.
If we can no longer read complex sentences, we will stop understanding (or having) complex thoughts. It is no wonder that kids spend so much time cursing each other; they are unused to qualifying statements or subtleties of argument.
Reading Dickens, Gogol, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thoreau, or Faulkner is more than a historical exercise or an obscure literary challenge. It expands our linguistic field and gives us entry to ideas that are not immediately palpable.
The “go with the flow” mantra comes from salespeople, not from educators (though, sadly, many educators buy into it). If we do not fight it, it will take over schools, and the resistant teachers will be written off as recalcitrant traditionalists. Then there will be no more education. It will all be advertising.
In my opinion, it already is taking over the schools. School officials have told groups of parents words to the effect of, “Well, this generation is different, they have shorter attention spans, so we have to teach differently to reach them.” This argument usually pops up when pleading for more money for technology.
As a parent, though, it is disquieting to hear the schools avowing that they will cater to short attention spans, rather than the opposite.
Devoting large amounts of time to video games does not prove the gamer possesses a long attention span when confronted with a page of text written for an educated audience. Nor, I might add, would I assume that model railway hobbyists would have the mental capacity to tackle _War and Peace_.
Apropos of catering to the short attention spans in the name of technology, here is a scary promotional video called “Pay Attention”, often shown at PD sessions. I wish it were parody, but it isn’t.
When I first read this blog, that bit about ever shorter attention spans seemed pretty obvious. But the comments got me to thinking a little deeper about such things. I never did think that “attention span” was a very solid concept. It’s a convenient term to use at times, and it certainly has some meaning. But a little reflection, I think, reveals that it doesn’t go very far. It doesn’t have much substance. It may be true in a very general way that the attention span of the young is shorter than the attention span of the older. But the length of an attention span is not easily measured, because it can vary so widely depending on so many different things. This is true at any age.
A concept that I think is much more solid and much more valuable is that of “mental habits”. Habits can be powerful, but they can also be very invisible. And different habits apply in different contexts. The mental habits that are ingrained in my mind when opening a book are quite different than the mental habits I acquired a few years ago when surfing the many channels of cable TV. But I have no concern that my channel surfing mental habits are going to make any inroads into my intellectual habits.
But as educators I think we should be very concerned about the mental habits we foster or allow in school. In this I am not alone, of course.
I have given some thought to habits in general in the past, and the results are on my website. Here’s a link. http://www.brianrude.com/Tchap12.htm (Use control-F to find the paragraph that begins with “Consider this example” if you want to avoid a slow introduction.)
This article is, first and foremost, a persuasive piece meant to convince potential advertisers to use KA because K understands today’s consumers and K’s ads will be therefore be more effective than the ads of other advertising companies who will simply bore your potential customers.
And it is certainly true (there have been studies to this effect) that consumers (of all ages) are much less affected by ads than was previously the case, probably because we are bombarded with them constantly. The fact that the number of ads permitted during an hour of TV has gone from 9 minutes to 16 minutes clearly has encouraged this behavior (if all of these ads were 15 sec. ads, that means that *74* different people are telling you to buy their stuff in just one hour. (Realistically, the number is probably between 32-74…but still).
WRT media in general, there is a lot *more* of it than there used to be, especially if you go all the way back to Dicken’s time, and people have to develop *some* some strategy to deal with the information overload. I wouldn’t be surprised if blogs in Dickens’ time complained that people were reading serialized novels rather than sitting down and reading Shakespeare (or whatever). Unfortunately, no blogs from Dickens’ time are still going. It’s also true that, in the 1600’s, people complained (in Germany, at any rate) that now one novel a year was being produced, and that was way too many. But others countered that that was just the right amount. (This was disenheartening to me when I studied lit in grad school, since having an entire year to study one novel meant that you could devote an inconceivable amount of time to it).
I think that Stephen makes a really good counterargument about attention spans with WoW and other video games – I’ll also note that I’ve known people to get together and watch most of a TV series on DVD in one sitting. And it’s worthwhile in this context to note that most of the very popular TV series are now much more sophisticated than they were in, say, the 70’s, such that you really do have to pay attention from episode to episode or you won’t know what’s going on. Some shows are essentially one (complicated) plot spread over 24 or so episodes. In other words, the strategy that these shows use to gain market share is to require a greater attention span.
It’s all very interesting.
“Advertisers do not want you to think too much, lest you decide against buying the product. They do not want you to discriminate too much aesthetically, for similar reasons”…depends on what you’re selling and who the competition is. If I think my product is truly better than the competition, then I do want you to think. Ditto for the aesthetics point.
Good points made by all. It is easy to generalize about “attention span” or about “advertising,” but the situation’s a bit more complex than appears at first glance. As David Foster points out, advertising can be intelligent; as Brian Rude explains, “attention span” may be a less useful term in this context than “mental habits.”
That said, there is decidedly less tolerance in education for lectures and long paragraphs than for snappy PowerPoint presentations and catchy sentences. I see in this a great loss, and attribute it to the prevalence of certain kinds of advertising. There’s less willingness than there was even a few decades ago to give something a chance that you don’t understand or like right away.
True, people have great stamina for watching a television series with an intricate plot. But they might have less patience with a Rivette, Fassbinder, or Tarkovsky film, for instance. They want swift action and frequent hooks. Not that the above directors don’t have these qualities, but their emphases are different.
I’m sure there are exceptions to the above statement: slow-moving, highly strategic video games, for instance, or highly unconventional TV series like Twin Peaks (or even Fassbinder’s Berlin-Alexanderplatz). Nonetheless, one thing is probably true more often than not: if the viewer, reader, or listener isn’t grabbed right away, he or she feels entitled to move on. There’s little sense of responsibility to stick it out, dig deeper, and find out what’s there.
Strikes me that there are an awful lot of people whose jobs require long attention spans. For starters:
1)Computer programmers and systems designers
2)Financial analysts
3)Writers of novels and screenplays
4)Craftsmen and artists of various kinds
5)Air traffic controllers (this one is interesting from an attention-span standpoint because attention on the overall traffic pattern must be maintained for hours, but the focus of attention within the pattern must change continuously)
It is at least arguable that more jobs require concentrated intellectual attention over long periods of time than they did in the past.
Each year I get a flood of new 16-year-olds who write quite similarly to the writing in the job application letters featured on the linked site. They don’t pay much attention to assignments, whether spoken or written or both.
They can’t get through a paragraph of Thoreau and make any sense of it, beyond the thought that it’s boring.
But they can play video games for long periods of time, and they pay constant attention to text messaging if given the chance, though the information content of the text messaging doesn’t usually rise above:
“im here”
“me 2″
Our school invested $50,000 this year for a consultant who surveys kids about how they feel about school. A little over 50% agreed with the statement that “school is boring.” There’s no way of knowing what this means or which kids answered this way. It could be the bright kids appalled at the slow pace of the constant remedial instruction. But I’m betting it will be decided it means we teach too much, and that it would be better if we got jester outfits and learned to juggle.
I can’t stand how cynical the overall article was and how smarmy this line is: “Even though you and I come from the still-literate side of the graph, we use and recommend branding tactics that leverage this post-literate reality…” And I thought I hated advertisers before.
Unless a person has full-blown ADHD, I don’t think there’s any reason why he shouldn’t be able to focus his attention on something he likes or something that interests him for long periods of time. For whatever reason, many in the current generation of students aren’t interested in their studies and therefore don’t want to devote their attention to them. As for advertisements, I don’t care if they’re using some brief “post-literate” jingle or some “literate” brochure; I’m just not interested.
A most interesting discussion.
I didn’t think I would come under personal attack (smarmy? who, me?) for reporting the decline of text-reading ability. I’ve also been observing the decline of writing skills for four decades.
See http://www.killianadvertising.com/coverletters.html and then beat me up some more.
But not to worry: “many in the current generation of students aren’t interested in their studies” so it couldn’t possibly be your fault.
“Even though you and I come from the still-literate side of the graph, we use and recommend branding tactics that leverage this post-literate reality”…This relates to the Neal Stephenson’s distinction between Morlocks and Eloi.
“But I’m betting it will be decided it means we teach too much, and that it would be better if we got jester outfits and learned to juggle.”
Except then 50% of the kids would complain that “juggling is boring.”
I wonder, how many adults – if you asked them – would agree with the statement “I am bored at my job.”? I suspect complaining about boredom is part of the modern condition, something that developed once we learned how to subdue the earth enough that 90% of our waking hours were no longer spent foraging for food or avoiding predators.
I don’t know. I know already that I’m “weird” because I read Dickens and long books on history for “fun.” But I can’t believe that I’m the only “weird” one out there, and that no one of the current generation of kids fits that “weird” type.
And besides, it’s an advertising firm writing this stuff. It’s kind of their job to both pander and be as cynical as possible (in the Oscar Wilde sense).
It is perhaps worth mentioning that Dickens (to use a recent example in this thread) was not written to be read in a single, extended lump. Dickens wrote for serialization; that is, he wrote his works for an audience that read only a few pages at a time. To ascribe some moral deficit to those who find it tedious to read a Dickens novel at one whack is, to put it charitably, intellectually unserious.
Frankly, this whole pocket tornado is of a piece with a thousand other laments over the last few millennia about “the kids these days”. We get it; they’re on your lawn … playing rock-and-roll and reading comic books. Again.
Kids have always thought that school was boring. (Sometimes they had legitimate complaints, too. If you can make history boring, it’s because you should never speak in public.) And, frankly, most people have always thought that reading for hours was boring.
Post-literate? I remember when* any serious science-fiction reader could read every serious book released in the genre in a year. There were few enough published that you bought them even if they were execrable. (For an example, ask a science fiction fan of “a certain age” about “Dhalgren”.)
There are far more (and larger) books being published today on virtually any subject than there were 40 years ago. It’s too bad nobody reads anymore. Charitable book publishing is the only possible cause; has anyone told the stockholders?
* Yes, I’m now old enough to write, “I remember when”. 8-/
“To ascribe some moral deficit to those who find it tedious to read a Dickens novel at one whack is, to put it charitably, intellectually unserious.”
I always found Dickens tedious, one whack or not. Same with Hardy…
Comparing the past to the present is the task of more than a lifetime. It’s easy to fall into one of the cliches: “Things were better back then” or “Those who think things were better back then are just nostalgic whiners.” Both are partly true; neither is completely true.
A thirty-two page installment of Dickens is more substantial than most of the “passages” kids are required to read in school, if they don’t go to a school that emphasizes literature.
There is no moral deficit in those who find it tedious to read a Dickens novel. We do become morally sloppy when we read only what interests us right away (and for only as long as it holds our interest). We all fall prey to this, because we only have so much time.
I have no qualms about putting a book aside because the writing is bad. I do regret putting books aside because they were long and I was “too busy” or because I didn’t have room for the complexity of ideas.
(On that note: I enjoyed Bob Killian’s cover letter page–but I wonder how many well-written and compelling cover letters are overlooked simply because they say more than the reader is willing to absorb.)
Part of school is about learning to understand what you don’t understand; to like what you don’t like; to read what you wouldn’t read otherwise; and to make time for things you have no time for. If the young ‘uns must always be motivated, then they will never have this experience.
When I was a teen (back in the 60’s), I checked out Homer’s Illiad and The Odyssey from the traveling bookmobile. What great stories they were for a kid from the projects who had to suffer a terribly boring summer vacation from public school. I didn’t know that they were classics, only that it was fun to read the adventures. I didn’t know how to define epic and hero, only that the stories made me wish to have been one of the participants. I didn’t know the meaning of vicarious, but I felt that I was there.
It wasn’t until I went to college in the 90’s (following a military career) that I discovered how boring and tedious Homer’s verse could be. Who cares about timbre, meter, historical relevence or cultural contribution more than literature teachers…nobody! Who could not care less…everybody else. Too often, educators take the fun out of reading; and if you’re a kid, fun matters. I paid a lot of money to be taught to hate literature; but I still read for entertainment…get it?
I blame whole language for the decline in students’ writing abilities.
Scapegoat achieved. Problem solved.
http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/