minutes to start yours now: consider carefully how technology affects your communication – both speaking and listening, at home, at work and with your friends or important social groups. Keep this one at the front of your consciousness, because technology changes fast, and its effects are not immediately obvious as we rush to adopt the latest gadget. Before TV, families used to talk, read, make music together, eat at the table, play games… aim to look afresh at least once a year at your use of tech and its effects on your social behavior.
IMPATIENCE
How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
- William Shakespeare, Othello
There is little doubt that technology is eroding our ability to focus and concentrate for an extended time on one task or object, be it a book, a piece of music or a conversation. A 2015 study of more than 2,000 people by Microsoft found that the average attention span had fallen from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to just 8 seconds, which is less than the estimated attention span of a goldfish. The study also found that people were better at multitasking than previously, but the influence of technology was clearly dividing the generations: 77 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 responded “yes” when asked, “When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone,” compared with only 10 per cent of those over the age of 65. Increasingly, we listen to tracks, not albums; we channel-hop rather than watching entire shows; we browse the web, spending on average less than a minute on any page; and many young people feel under-stimulated if they are not consuming 2 or even 3 streams of input at the same time.
Impatience has had a major effect in political discourse, where we have little time for oratory. The advent of instant, 24-hour news means that most political expression happens not in debating chambers but in front of TV cameras or even on social media. Fuelled by the need to create something to say all day, even in the absence of any real events, a mainstay of the media response has become ‘attack journalism’, which is obsessed with scandal. Demanding an answer to the question “Who is to blame?” has become the primary purpose of much interviewing and editorial decision-making. This springs from the Being Right leech, of course: we all feel a little better if we can be outraged and judgmental about someone or some organisation doing terrible things, so we implicitly encourage this kind of media sensationalism and witch-hunting. The same leech, expressed in constant impatience, fuels an epidemic of interrupting in media debate (and in millions of private conversations too).
The result is that the soundbite has become the prime vehicle for explaining political policy or opinion; get your proposition across in 20 seconds, or you will be interrupted. Politicians have learned to be ‘on-message’ at all times, employing large media teams to brief them and buffer them from aggressive questioning; they now avoid expressing strong opinions if at all possible, in case they are called to account later for changing their mind (which is now a heinous crime for some reason).
The conversation that arises in this fast-cut, short attention span, confrontational, blaming world is inevitably impoverished. This is true not only for politics but also for day-to-day discourse. Real listening takes time and effort; it is not compatible with multitasking or an eight-second attention span. Effective speaking requires being fully present and conscious. It’s not surprising that so many conversations end with a dismissive “whatever!”
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