Our Incredible Shrinking Attention Spans

I came of age at the same time music videos were born. Everyone in my high school wanted to have cable television just so we could watch MTV. There were only about 10 music videos that had been produced, but we didn't care how many times we watched the same songs by Sting, Michael Jackson, or the Buggles (look it up).

But video killed more than the radio star; it may have killed our attention spans. Music videos introduced the less-than-five-second edit point. Prior to the early 1980s, television viewers were accustomed to longer edits; sometimes the camera angle didn't change for up to one minute! Now we have adjusted to a less-than-five-second edit point and we get bored if asked to view anything that changes with less frequency.

Think about Huntley and Brinkley staring into the camera with very little film (not video) to break up their reporting. Now compare that to today's newscasts, which provide us a view of the world that seems hectic and hurried because that's how the video is edited. Television commercials fly by at an even faster pace.

Did the music video kill our attention spans?