Ever take a moment and go watch the public stream on Twitter for 10 minutes? It’s basically a case study in Attention Deficit Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Behavior. ADD and OCD, however, may very well be what make Twitter work! Most educators and psychologists agree that the ability to focus one’s attention on a task is crucial for the achievement of one’s goals. According to accepted child development charts, attention span increases with age at about 3-5 minutes per year but generally maxes out at around 20 minutes in a fully grown adult. It’s also generally accepted that the more a person likes doing something, the more motivated they will be to do it thereby increasing their attention span for that task. OK, ok, I’ve bored you with a little backstory. Now, here’s the kicker… “Continuous attention span,” or the amount of time a human can focus on an object without any lapse at all, is very brief and may be as short as 8 seconds. Any journalist will tell, you if you can’t interest a reader in the first few sentences (around 8 seconds), you’ve probably lost them. Isn’t it amazing how a Tweet or a Facebook Status Update fits right into that time frame? It’s almost like you have to work harder to bore someone in under 8 seconds than to interest them in more, huh?
Last week I had an interesting Twitter conversation with Mike Volpe of Hubspot. We, more succinctly, summed up the quandary of how when everyone was blogging and we had more than 140 characters for a conversation, nobody really listened. Now that everyone’s on Twitter and dropping idea bombs in 140 characters, people are complaining that that’s not enough room for conversation. I’m inclined to agree with Copyblogger’s Brian Clark that Twitter makes people better copywriters. To get your idea out in a way that catches people’s attention in less than 140 characters is an art form. The medium itself, helps you immediately determine who you find interesting without all the fluff. People you trust for content will recommend other people you might find trust worthy through the retweet feature. It’s beautiful. Micro-content, easily digestible and relatable that either makes you want to follow or say “meh, I’ll pass.” The more interesting the overall body of tweets from a user, the more likely you will be to follow their links to content they recommend. Twitter is basically the Internet’s Cliff Notes and a referral program all in one and basically perfect for people with short attention spans.
On the flip side that attention thing, consider OCD. People are obsessive about Tweeting. Heavy users can tweet over 100 times per day. What makes Twitter so addictive? Well, remember how I mentioned people are more likely to pay longer attention to a task they like to do and Twitter can be very likeable if you get the right feedback. The realtime feedback they get from other users feeds their obsession. It’s a way for them to immediately interact with others, get the proverbial “pat on the back/ass” (whichever you prefer) for their efforts. Noticeably, the people sharing the most interesting or relevant content and actually engaging with other users through the reply feature are the ones that tend to become most easily addicted. But I contend that OCD behaviors fuel Twitter and are what make it an engaging and conversational medium. I, myself have a hard time being 100% OCD about Twitter and admittedly lifestream my Delicious bookmarks, Facebook status updates and Google Reader Likes over to Twitter to keep my stream active.
So, with our collective attention span and obsessive disorders, Twitter seems like a logical news source. Headlines or calls to action in tweets give us just enough to immediately respond to or take action on based on our interest. Simply put, Twitter works because we don’t have the attention span to read all the news everyday and it keeps us engaged by the immediate gratification of real time communication with fuels the obsession!
What the hell happened to our attention span?
In my research of this post, I stumbled across the most concerning metric ever… not only have we figured out the Human continuous attention span is only 8 seconds (only slightly longer than that of a goldfish’s memory), but Neil Postman sacred the crap out of all of us in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Neil points out that in the 1800s the human attention span was many hours long and has been steadily decreasing as a result of television, technology and the Internet.
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