Do you ever get the feeling that in the age of the smart phone, your attention span has been depleted so much that it’s hard to concentrate long enough to complete simple tasks like performing lasagna surgery or cooking brains?
Me neither. But my wife is worried that I get distracted by my phone too much and it may have serious consequences for my children and me.
She cited some study she read that found that when parents check their phones all the time, their children are more likely to have short attention spans themselves and struggle at school and end up at some third-rate university like McGill. Or something like that… I wasn’t really paying attention. I saw on Twitter that Donald Trump wants to start a milk war with Canada? What a joke! Everyone knows that in this whole situation it’s only that presidential pile of smushed leather who needs to be pasteurized. #uddernonsense #gassy #milkdud
To be honest, I have started to worry just a little bit about what our Twitter/Facebook/Google world is doing to our brains. On an average work day a few years ago, I would do a quick check of Twitter and Facebook two or three times a day to see if I’d missed any big news. Things are different these days – I literally checked Twitter three times while writing this sentence.
I fear it may be bleeding into my non-computer world, too. A while back, I found myself home alone for an entire day with no children to distract me from one of my favourite pastimes: watching the March Madness basketball tournament. In my younger days, I would pull up a chair right in front of the TV and stay there all day, getting up only to resupply my food bucket with chips, stew, beer, wings and pretzels (back then, my Canada Food Guide had only one food group: brown).
Hold on a second, though, I’ve got to interrupt this anecdote because Jose Bautista is up to bat for the Blue Jays with the bases loaded. Wonder if he’ll come through with a hit. Huh. A quadruple play?
Anyway, March Madness… I settled in to watch this year’s tournament and it took literally nine seconds for my hands to wander to my phone. Then my laptop opened. Then I became engrossed in Twitter and noticed everyone talking about an exciting play… that had just happened right in front of me but I didn’t notice because I was looking at Twitter.
That’s when I started to keep a running diary of my day to see if I really did have an attention span problem. Here’s what I wrote:
“Watch a bit of basketball. Fantasy baseball ranks. Fold a bit of laundry. Breakfast. More baseball. More basketball. Fold more laundry. Clean bottles out of kitchen. Basketball. Make beds.”
First of all, this list of activities spanned approximately 20 minutes, making for an average of about two minutes per activity. That’s maybe a little scary.
Scarier though: “Make beds?” As I indicated before, my wife was not even home that day. There was no need to pretend I cared about making the beds. What the hell have they done to my brain? We’re all going to die!
Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, attention span. A study came out a couple of years ago that said Canadians now have shorter attention spans than goldfish, down to eight seconds in 2015 compared to 12 seconds in the year 2000. Is that really a problem though?
We’ve seen that in this day and age, a goldfish-coloured creature with a tiny brain, short attention span and no communication skills that lives in a box surrounded by pirates and treasure chests can do anything, even become president. Do we really want to pay close attention to that kind of world?
In conclusion, I’m probably going to keep sneaking peaks at my phone to check baseball scores.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News.
[email protected] • @Sports_Andy
