Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.
To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.
With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.
Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.
I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.
Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
It kind of renews my faith in humankind that there's long attention spans left out there that can listen to a 12-minute song.
People's attention spans don't run too long these days.
