The term “information overload” is frequently used to describe the common experience of feeling bombarded and inundated with incoming data. Is this a new kind of human experience, or an ancient one? What is the relationship between information overload and attention span? How have things changed in the digital age? Is there anything we can do to address the issue?
To discuss these and related questions, the Wellness Letter spoke with psychologist Gloria Mark, PhD, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Mark’s research focus is the impact of digital media on people’s lives. Her latest book, Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, was published last year. She also writes an online newsletter on Substack called The Future of Attention: How to Function in the Digital Age.
Wellness Letter: How old is the concept of “information overload”?
Gloria Mark: The concept has been around for a long time—it didn’t start with computing and the digital age. The ancient Greeks and Romans also talk about this idea. Socrates talked about how, when we start writing things down, our minds will shrink and we will start forgetting things because everything is put into this external memory. There was a physician who cursed the printing press after it was invented because he thought it would lead to information overload, even though he himself had written dozens of books.
WL: What makes it different in the digital age? Why has it become such a common meme?
GM: The difference is the volume of information and the speed with which we can access it. And it’s not just information, it’s communications with other people as well. We can access other people and information within milliseconds, essentially. So as soon as a thought or some crazy question pops into your head, you can look it up and satisfy that urge. And humans are curious—that’s part of our nature. So we can pursue and satisfy our curiosity so easily.
WL: What is the relationship between information overload and attention span?
GM: People have a finite amount of attentional resources or attentional capacity. I like to use the metaphor of a fuel tank. We have this tank, and things we do throughout the day drain it. And information overload—in other words, paying attention to all that information—drains that tank, especially if you’re doing things that involve some amount of mental effort. So you can watch a YouTube video all day if it’s easy and simple, because there’s little mental effort involved. But if you’re trying to write an article and read things, there’s just a limit to our capacity as to what we can do before we have to step back and take a break. And that relates to attention span because we have found that, in this digital era, our attention spans have gotten quite a bit shorter.
WL: When you refer to the digital era, what is the start date you’re thinking of?
GM: There is no exact starting point. I like to date it from the mid-’90s, because that’s when the internet gained widespread popularity, although a lot of people didn’t really adopt it until 2000 or so. But you can also think of the digital age as really starting when smartphones were invented, which was in 2007. That was a game changer. Something really flipped in the next decade after that. I personally think it had already started before then, because we were already measuring attention back in 2003 and found that attention spans were very short.
Back then, we’d follow people around, click stopwatches, note down what people were doing, because that was the state-of-the-art technology at the time. We measured every time they switched screens or switched activities. Picking up the phone, putting the phone down, opening up emails. We measured everything. And then later, starting in 2012, we had computer-logging software. So we could actually see people switching screens or, rather, switching windows. And we could look at the rate at which they were switching windows. In 2012, the average duration on any screen was 75 seconds. And from the years 2016 through 2020, it averaged 47 seconds on any screen.
WL: Is this phenomenon an inherent feature of the internet?
GM: Yes, I argue that the internet is structured to distract us. Everything we do on the internet leaves a digital trace. Tech companies and ad companies construct profiles of us and gear the information to exactly what they believe we will click on. Our social natures also play a role. We seek social rewards and respond to email, texting, and social media, for all kinds of social reasons. We want to maintain what’s called social capital. There are also personality differences. People who are anxious or neurotic—which I happen to be—are more likely to switch their attention than people who aren’t. Conscientious people might check email more often.
And if you take a broader view, the overall media environment reinforces the short attention spans. The length of shots in films and TV shows has decreased over time. Each shot now averages about four seconds. If you watch a blockbuster, like Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, the shots change every two seconds. I was looking at YouTube tutorials on how to design a YouTube video, and what they promote in these tutorials is to do jump cuts, which are abrupt changes with the intent of getting us to pay attention better.
WL: What can we do to counteract this? I assume turning off notifications on your phone is a good way to start.
GM: There’s a lot people can do on their own. Getting control of your attention is about getting control over the flow of information, or the overflow of information, that’s coming at you continually. If you can control what you’re seeing, that’s also a way to help maintain your attention span and manage this overload of information. The first thing, of course, is to turn off notifications. That’s a no-brainer.
It was an original premise or assumption of the technologists and designers that people would want to be notified. We had these tools that could inform us of when someone was trying to reach us or when some important news article came out. Whatever people felt in the beginning about notifications, this basic assumption is really contrary to what I think a lot of people want now. A lot of people now don’t want to be disturbed all the time.
WL: What other strategies do you suggest?
GM: We can make ourselves become more conscious about what we’re doing. Our tendency to change screens or switch between online activities comes from our impulses or urges—such as I have this question that suddenly came up, I want to check the news, or I automatically check my email or messages. We can make ourselves more conscious of these self-interruptions. I call this meta-awareness. We can learn to be more reflective of our actions and probe them, and we can do this by stopping and asking ourselves, “Why am I switching screens now? Do I need to check the news right now?” And if you can make that more conscious, then you can create a plan to be more intentional about your actions. You might say, “Okay, I’m going to work for 30 more minutes, and then I will reward myself and read the news.”
We can also practice forethought—that’s the idea of imagining our future self. When we find ourselves getting distracted, we can pause and imagine what we want to be doing at the end of the day, and how we want to be feeling. So I want to be feeling rewarded, fulfilled, relaxed. I want to see myself reading a book, or being with friends or watching a show. The last thing I want to be doing is working on that deadline. And having a visualization of this idea of our future self, at the end of the day, can help keep us on track and avoid the constant distractions.
