An article for the Contrabanda column on new trends in music business: consolidation, fragmentation and bifurcation.
In Bob Dylan’s “biographical and autobiographical” book (“Chronicles”) there is a short disquisition on the advent of “songs.” It weighs in at ten lines (in a book of 293 pages) but it is worth quoting. It talks about ’60/’61. I translate -well- from my Italian translation: “America was changing badly. Sociologists said that TV had murderous intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of young people - that their attention spans were being shortened. Maybe that was true but even the three-minute songs had the same effect.”
He then went on to recall how “symphonies and operas” required much greater mnemonic efforts, to which however the audience of the time seemed to adapt without particular problems. Instead, he observed, “With the three-minute song, the listener doesn’t have to remember anything [of what was said] twenty minutes earlier, not even ten. Nothing to remember.” A change that in his opinion was happening right then.
Every simplification always requires imprecision and bending the facts a bit to suit the situation. So his thesis was that folk songs were “long anyway, maybe not as long as an opera or a symphony, but still long” even though there were many short ones, under three minutes.
Today it is fashionable to take for granted DDAI (in Italian - and it sounds like "come on!") In English it is ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and we accept that this neuropsychiatric disorder may generated by the frequent use of digital media and the tendency to use more than one at the same time.
On the subject, Microsoft publicized an article in 2015 that included a memorable meme: that our “average attention span” seems to have shrunk from 12” (in 2000) to 8” (in 2013). Not only that. The study defined our average 8” of attention as “one second less” of attention “than a goldfish.” The factoid stuck and I wouldn't be surprised if it pushed (in?)/conscientious mothers and fathers to run to the shrink to get a prescription for lisdexamfetamine - allegedly a good remedy 'from the age of 6.'
In reality it seems that no one can calculate with certainty those 'nine seconds of the goldfish' and a study by a certain D.K Subramaniam ("Myth and Mystery of Shrinking Attention Span") has cast doubt on whether those data really existed.
In short, this God-blessed "attention span" seems likely to be "task-dependent." Like: if a sadistic clown is chasing you with a baseball bat and razor blades stuck in the wood, your attention span goes on not for 8" but for dozens of minutes; but if it's a matter of listening to a Kardashian talking about Van Gogh, it may well approach zero.
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Published on BlowUp Magazine, #319, issue December 2024.