The Decline of Attention Span in the Digital Era
This article was written by Flicka Miracle Simarmata, Global Strategic Communications Batch of 2025, First Place Winner of the National English Olympics 2025 Essay Competition organized by BINUS English Club (BNEC).
Like any teenager would do in their free time, you turn on your phone and open TikTok. One video, some Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated slop italian brainrot meme, scroll. Next, some tarot reading for your future love life—where the creator claims they put no hashtags, therefore the universe says it was meant for you, scroll. And the one after, a layout of cut up clips of your favorite TV show, with repetitive Subway Surfers gameplay playing in the background, scroll. And before you know it, the notification pops up. It reads, “Five Minutes Left for TikTok,” but like clockwork, your fingers automatically swipe it up, and hence again, you continue to scroll. Despite the endless scrolling through short form video content, no piece of media can ever satisfy your needs, not a single commentary video nor meme compilation will ever come close to fulfilling your corrupted attention span.
Since the early 21st century, the integration of smartphones into every facet of our lives has led to a new profound phenomenon: the erosion of our attention spans. According to a research conducted by Dr. Gloria Mark at the University of California in 2004, she found that an individual’s average attention span on a digital device was approximately 150 seconds long. However by the year 2012, that number had plummeted by half, to 75 seconds. Now, recent data from 2024 suggests that it has now reached a staggering low of 47 seconds. (Mark, 2023) Slowly, what will come next? Will it continue to divide and dissolve till nothing?
This decline is not merely a consequence of one suffering “too much screen time,” but instead a shift of how information is now produced, curated or distributed, and consumed. The digital era has introduced to us a relentless wave of stimuli, whether it is notifications, short-form videos, and infinite scrolling (best known as doomscrolling), has rewired the way our brains work. Understanding the impact of digitalization towards our ever-changing lives, we get to see how it changes ourselves cognitively, and how it leads to an imminent future we cannot avoid.
First, to understand why our attention is failing, we need to first define what it is. Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, while ignoring other perceivable details that may stimulate us. Throughout human evolution, attention was tuned for our survival. There were two systems: one that reacts to sudden movements or loud noises (survival cues), and one that allows for goal oriented focus (gathering food, or building tools).
But in the digital era, the balance between these two systems has now been disrupted. Digital platforms are designed to trigger the first system, involuntary attention. From a ping of a notification, or the bright red flash of the like icon, now mimics the environmental triggers our ancestors used to detect dangers or opportunities. However, whilst those ancient triggers were somewhat occasional, modern triggers are constant. When we are stuck in a perpetual state of reactive attention, the second system, our pre-frontal cortex—the part of the brain that is responsible for sustained focus and impulse control—as an outcome, becomes fatigued (Levitin, 2014).
However, the decline of attention is not an accidental byproduct of technology, but instead a feature of its design. As we live in an Attention Economy, a term coined by Herbert Simon (1971), where he famously quoted that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” And in this economy? Human attention is its primary currency.
One of the most significant, yet overlooked, casualties of the digital era is the death of boredom. Historically, boredom served as a biological signal, a state of our brain to “rest” that forced it into the Default Mode Network (DMN). The DMN is the neurological system that becomes active when we are not focused on the outside world, instead disassociating such as when we are daydreaming or reflecting. It is within this network that our brain synthesizes creativity and autobiographical memory.
We instead have developed a reflex to “fill in the gaps.” Whether we’re waiting for our coffee order to be called or sitting in a doctor’s office, the smartphone ensures that we (and our brains) will never have to face a moment of inactivity. By constantly feeding our attention system with external stimuli, we effectively starve our DMN. As a result, the imaginative and creative “aha!” moments that typically occur during periods of mental wandering become increasingly rare. When we lose that ability of being bored, we slowly lose our ability to innovate ourselves, as the mind is never given the proper silence from stimuli required to connect disparate ideas into new concepts.
In the evergrowing digital age, social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube utilize what is called “variable reward schedules,” the same psychological mechanism used in slot machines. When a user scrolls through their apps, they cannot predict if the next piece of content will be utter boredom or hilarious. This idea of uncertainty triggers a release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with craving and reward (Lustig, 2017). Because the reward is merely “just one scroll away,” the brain becomes locked in a neverending loop of seeking for that instant gratification, making the slow and effortful process of other forms of entertainment like reading a book or sitting in a cinema feel excruciatingly dull by comparison.
But why? Why are we stuck in this endless time loop of what feels like a neverending journey? Well, the design of our digital environment is far from neutral. The “infinite scroll,” a feature now standard across many social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, is specifically engineered to remove “stopping cues.” In the physical world, stopping cues are natural endings—the end of a chapter in a book, the end of a newspaper page, or even the Netflix screen asking us “would you like to continue watching?” These cues force us to face a moment of conscious decision-making: “Do I continue, or do I stop?”
Digital platforms have purposefully dismantled and torn down boundaries. By creating a frictionless stream of content, platforms bypass the executive function of our prefrontal cortex. The user enters a state of “zombie-scrolling,” where the brain is receiving enough dopamine to stay engaged, but just not enough substance to ever feel satisfied. This creates that “poverty of attention” (Simon, 1971) not because the content served to us is necessarily bad, but because the delivery system is designed to prevent the user from ever looking away from our phones.
Aside from this dopamine loop, the rise of short-form video content has accelerated this decline. In a 15-minute scroll session on a platform like TikTok a teenager may consume up to 60 different videos, each requiring a total shift in context. This “context switching” prevents the brain from entering a “flow state,” the deep immersive focus required for mastery and creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Research has shown that one’s frequent exposure to such high intensity of rapid stimuli trains the brain to expect information in 15 to 30 second bursts, making any task requiring more than a minute of focus feel like a monumental hurdle.
Additionally, one of the most pervasive myths of the digital age is that we as workers have become drastically “better” at multitasking. Cognitive science, however, tells us a different story. The human brain is largely a serial processor—it cannot actually perform two attention-heavy tasks at once—but instead, it engages in task-switching. Every time we switch from a work report to a completely unrelated text message and back, our brains pay what is called a “switching cost.” It takes the brain several minutes to regain the same level of depth it had before it was interrupted (Newport, 2016). But there are rare cases, known as chronic multitaskers, who keep twenty tabs open while in a Zoom call, and can actually show reduced cognitive control. They instead turn into a sucker for “irrelevancy,” being unable to filter out unimportant information (Ophir et al., 2009).
Consequently, the decline of sustained attention has far-reaching implications that extend beyond just a single individual. In schools and universities, educators are reporting a “crisis of focus” in classrooms. Students accustomed to the fast paced stimulation of the internet now struggle with deep reading—the ability to engage with complex texts, follow long-form arguments, and synthesize information. This leads to a preference for students to skim and over-scan, resulting in a more superficial understanding of subject matter.
While adults experience a decline in attention though, the children born into the era of digitalization and the internet may never be able to develop that capacity for sustained focus in the first place. This is a clear distinction between degeneration and impeded development. In the first two decades of life, the brain’s plasticity is at its peak. If a child’s primary mode of interaction with the world is through rapid-fire digital stimuli, their neural pathways are optimized for quick-switching rather than deep processing.
Wolf (2018) notes that the “reading brain” is not innate—but must be painstakingly built through years of effort and practice. By replacing physical play stimuli and long-form storytelling with short-form digital media, we are at risk of raising a generation that will forever be cognitively “wired” for distraction. This is not a matter of laziness, but instead a structural adaptation to an environment that rewards speed and skimming over depth and understanding.
Mentally, there is a measurable correlation between frequent attention switching and stress. Dr. Gloria Mark’s research (2023) has indicated that as our attention spans shrink, our perceived stress levels and heart rates rise. The constant behavior of “checking” creates a state of continuous partial attention, where our consciousness is never fully present. This decline of attention is not just an issue of mental health crisis, it leads to a profound psychological toll to living a fragmented life. When we cannot focus, we cannot engage in meditative presence, leading to a phenomenon called “Digital Kinesthesis,” a feeling of being everywhere at once but nowhere in particular. The constant ping of the digital world keeps the body in a state of low-level “fight or flight” mode. Because our brain treats every notification as a potential social emergency or opportunity, the cancel culture wave hating you for that one tweet or that celebrity noticing you on Instagram, the sympathetic nervous system remains activated. This explains why Mark (2023) found a direct correlation between short attention spans and high stress levels. We are essentially always forcing our biological systems to run at a “clock speed” that they were never designed to maintain, leading to the modern epidemic of that burnout and generalized anxiety.
An argument by Cal Newport, an author and computer science professor, argues that the ability to even perform in a state of “Deep Work” (concentrating without distraction on a cognitively demanding task) has become more and more rare, meanwhile it has now become the most valuable asset in our economy. And if society loses the ability to focus, then we will lose the ability to solve complex problems, from climate change to medical breakthroughs.
While the decline of attention is a systemic issue, what can we do to re-train our brains? This next process is often known as “Digital Minimalism” or “Attention Hygiene.” This strategy is composed of four steps. First, Monotasking. This step forces the brain to stay on one singular task for over 20 minutes to rebuild the “focus muscle.” It trains yourself to be able to stay consistent in one singular activity, no need to change the context or switch it up because of boredom. The second step is the Digital Detoxing step. Scheduling yourself to push through periods of time without any electronic devices helps lower dopamine sensitivity. Either you lock your devices in a cabinet, or even shut them off, helps. What Gen-Z actually has been doing is turning on their phone’s camera into a timelapse mode, and letting it record your work. This acts like a work–reward mechanism, since you get a satisfying result of your hours of doing a singular work task in video form (aside from you finishing your task too, obviously).
The third step that you can take is Environment Curation, where you find yourself in a new location where there are no distractions in sight. No phones, no distraction. It builds a mindset where “you have to do your work now,” and it reduces your cognitive load. And the fourth and final step is Mindfulness. Practicing your focus through acts like meditation help strengthen the prefrontal cortex’s ability to notice and ignore distractions. This trains your brain to take that sense of boredom and use it to practice creating narrative scenarios. This not only increases your imaginative thinking, but it slowly trains it to bloom and thrive in moments of boredom, where you don’t need to fill in any more gaps or pick up your phone.
The decline of our attention spans in the digital era is perhaps the most significant and impactful cognitive challenge of our time. We are currently and unconsciously participating in a global, unmonitored experiment on the plasticity and controllability of the human brain. While digital tools have provided us with unprecedented access to information, they have simultaneously eroded our capacity to process that information deeply.
If we continue on the current trajectory, we face a risk where we experience division of the mind, and even our society as a whole. We may see a future where society is split into two tiers—an “attention elite” consisting of people who have mastered the discipline and resources to protect their prized possession of focus, and a collective of “distracted masses” whose attention is entirely harvested by manipulators and sold by corporations. As the ability for one to think deeply is the core foundation of democracy, science, and art. Without it, we become easily susceptible to oversimplified narratives and fake news, as we no longer have the cognitive stamina to even fact-check complex situations or follow through with complex arguments. The decline of the attention span is, therefore, not just one’s own personal struggle, but instead is a collective challenge for us all that will determine the quality of our culture and the resilience of our civilizations in the centuries to come.
Taking that effort to reverse this trend requires more than just an individual’s willpower—it requires a societal shift in how we now value attention. We must now move away from a culture that celebrates the idea of “being busy” and “always on” toward one that protects the sanctity of our precious focus. Our ability to think deeply, relate to others authentically, and solve the world’s most pressing problems depends entirely on our ability to pay attention. So, will you choose to doomscroll down the endless rabbithole of useless stimuli? It is time for us to take that step in training ourselves to maintain the rarity which is your attention span. In this age, protecting our attention is, in the most literal sense, the only way to protect our humanity.
Works Cited
Anderson, J. R. (2004). Cognitive psychology and its implications (6th ed.). Worth Publishers.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Levitin, D. J. (2014). The organized mind: Thinking straight in the age of information overload. Dutton.
Loh, K. K., & Kanai, R. (2014). Higher media multi-tasking activity is associated with smaller gray-matter density in the anterior cingulate cortex. PLOS ONE, 9(9), e106695. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0106695
Lustig, R. H. (2017). The hacking of the American mind: The science behind the corporate takeover of our bodies and brains. Avery.
Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: A ground-breaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. Hanover Square Press.
Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M., & Harris, J. (2005). No-task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 321–330. https://doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055017
Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Grand Central Publishing.
Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). Cognitive control in media multitaskers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583–15587. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0903620106
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communications, and the public interest (pp. 37–72). The Johns Hopkins Press.
Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world. Harper.
