42 Seconds

Yes the Three arms and six fingers are delibrate … for a reason

Attention collapse and the goldfish that never existed

Forty-seven seconds is how long you will stay focused on any single screen before your attention wanders to the next tab, the next notification, the thing you were meant to check, the thing you did not know you needed. Not 47 minutes or 47 sentences, just 47 seconds on a screen before your brain, politely but firmly, decides it would like to be somewhere else.

What this means for me is that TLDR is too long!

47 seconds is the life’s work of Dr Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine, who spent nearly two decades with a stopwatch and a notebook watching real people at real screens. She published her excellent book *Attention Span* and is on substack. The number she started with, back in 2004, was two and a half minutes, which felt small, and by 2020, it has become the famous and much quoted 47 seconds.

Apparently, before digital, sustained human attention was measured in hours and not seconds. Now, how true this is, as a neuro-minority, I am not sure. I can imagine some dons in the English department reading Shakespeare together coming to the conclusion that attention was hours, but that was probably never the norm. So is the average attention dropping, or are we just getting better data from the entire diversity of society and our global market? We probably don’t know. However, the fall in attention is real, as the value for engagement trumped attention, which has been optimised away. I trust/hope not permanently destroyed, but crowded out, squeezed into smaller and smaller windows by every new layer of digital interruption we have added since Aza Raskin filed a patent for infinite scroll in 2006.

So those like me who write long form started writing TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) to get engagement back. It was a small white flag as the into/ marketing section of every piece of writing. Yes, I knew most readers never read my full work, and linkedin optimses against me for long form as I can see the stats, but I write for my understanding. I did TLDR as it felt useful and it proved the point that very few read, but some do comment without reading …..

Douglas Adams.

In *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*, the supercomputer Deep Thought is asked for “The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” After seven and a half million years of computation, it returns its answer.

42

Not 47 but 42, which is specific, confident, slightly baffling, and completely useless without the question it was answering — which is the point. Now, Douglas Adams never wrote about attention spans, and unfortunately, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe does not contain a fact about the moment all attention collapses to 42 seconds which seams like it is obvious now. The goldfish does not take precisely 42 seconds to swim around its bowl, BUT I am about to imagine them anyway.

The famous claim that a goldfish has a nine-second attention span — shorter than a human’s eight seconds — did appear in a 2015 Microsoft Canada marketing report, but the number wasn’t from Microsoft’s own research. It was sourced to a third-party firm called Statistic Brain, who, when the BBC investigated in 2017, could not provide any credible source for it. The goldfish comparison was borrowed from an older folk myth about goldfish having a three-second memory — itself unverified — and repackaged as a fact about human attention. It spread anyway. As my dad embellished Mark Twain, “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.“

So we have a story partly built on a fictional fish, a real researcher with two decades of data, and 42. 42 is better than 47 as it is the answer to everything, and crucially, it fits in a story in a way that 47 does not. 47 is just a number, whereas 42 is a reason.

42 seconds.

So from now on, instead of TLDR, I will write summaries of exactly 42 seconds, which will oddly include the question, not the answer. 42 is long enough to make a real point but short enough that your attention is still here when you scroll on. Calibrated not to a word count but to a reading speed measured in spacetime. (don’t go there)

I hope my 42-second summaries will be a mini version of the piece, complete in themselves, not a consolation for those who have already moved on.

If 42 seconds is enough — fantastic, if anyone wants the rest of the piece is still there, but at least you will know whether it is worth digging deeper before commenting.

I see the actual problem with attention for my writing is that every piece of content asks for your attention before giving you any reason to spend it. The impressive headline, attention-grabbing title, the fact that is not true …. the wow factor

The 42-second summary is a promise which I hope Deep Thought would approve as the goldfish, if it existed, would have swum around exactly once and then think, “Let’s do that again, it all looks new”

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Just a nod to Zee who tried 42 sec videos back in 2005 ish .. sometimes it is timing.