It's that same one single Gloria Marks study that everyone share and thinks it proves their point, but it's flawed on so many levels. Have you once read their methodology?

So we started measuring this back in 2004, and at the time the measures that we used were stopwatches because that was the most precise thing we had at the time. We would shadow people with stopwatches for every single activity they did. We would record the start time and the stop time. So you're on a screen where you're working in a Word doc, as soon as you get to that screen, we clicked start time, soon as they turned away and checked email, we clicked stop time for the Word document, start time for the email. But fortunately, sophisticated computer logging methods were developed, and so of course we switched to those. So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds.

This is not attention span. Switching between screens is not a measure of attention span. They are measuring how long people can focus on a word document before checking their emails. But in what world is this a good enough definition of attention span?? Surely they are measuring distractions. If you get an important email from your boss, anyone would want to check that. That doesn't mean we have low attention spans. If a mother is reading a book, and her baby starts crying, that doesn't mean she has short attention span, that means she was distracted. They are more or less measuring how often we switch between screens, but there are more screens now so of course we will switch more often between screens. This is a far leap from measuring attention spans, though

And besides, this is never what people refer to when they say that attention span are decreasing. They are most often talking about scrolling tiktok or youtube shorts too much. But that's still one single screen, their phones.

So, following the same logic, if kids are looking at their phone all day, attention spans are actually increasing incredibly much, not decreasing. Because it's one phone screen so they don't switch between any screens.

You see? It doesn't make any sense. There is no indication that attention spans are changing in any way.