Why are you here then? How the hell are you going to ban all underage people from social media, who are you going to bestow complete authority over our digital identities to and who gets the authority to decide the details of how it is done? You are being intellectually lazy and it shows. > if you need more information as to why, go speak to any schoolteacher in America who can't get their students to pay attention for more than 60 seconds, or who can't retain information that is literally written on the board in front of them. https://edspace.american.edu/thecfebeat/2025/01/01/the-myth-of-the-shrinking-attention-span-shed-siliman/ > Spring 2025 > A few weeks ago, a YouTube short caught my attention. The short was yet another commentary on how Gen Z supposedly can’t focus on a particular thing for more than a few seconds. I scrolled through the YouTube comments and noticed a refrain: studies prove it. Everyone’s attention span is shorter, studies prove, as we become more deeply immersed in a digital, screen-filled world (insert unknown source here). Today’s teens, studies prove, bear the brunt of this crisis with an attention span shorter than that of a goldfish. > Something about that claim gnawed at me. After years of experience in the field of educational development, I knew the reality was more complicated than these sweeping generalizations. Where were these studies everyone kept referencing? What evidence existed behind this seemingly universal belief about our shrinking ability to focus? > I suspected I might find only a few studies to support the claim. I was not prepared, however, to find absolutely no evidence. ... > The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).