Yet another vector floral ornament. This time the header uses a classier color palette.

Yes, I do like Floral ornaments :) They are great to embellish a project. As usual, it comes in .eps and .svg format.

Enjoy.

After decades of TV, Radio, Magazines and now Internet, we find ourselves in a society overwhelmed by information begging for attention. As a result of that we have a world with an attention span now shorter than a goldfish’s. How is the media and specially the web facing that? And how can we take advantage on way the human mind works?

It is Christmas morning. I run desperately to the x-mas tree and can’t even breath while unwrapping my latest Atary 2600 cartridge (I know, I am old), and guess what! I got ‘Raiders of the lost ark’(tm) Sweet! Now I could spend endless hours playing that crappy game –knowing now that Jungle Hunt was much better.

It was 1982

Yes, no Tivo, no Blackberry, PCs, no Internet! Wait! No Twitter and Facebook! Just Sesame Street and Atari to compete for our attention.
At that time, I could only dream of having lots of video games to play. The closest I got to that was trading cartridges with my neighbors. But then, in a day like any other, thanks to the Internet I got an unlimited stock of Roms and there I was with literally thousands of games to play.

Guess what? I got bored!

Who has the commitment to beat one game when you can go zapping into thousands? We live in era of TMI (Too Much Information) and our attention span (The amount of time a person can concentrate on a single activity) is getting progressively lower.

Attention span has decreased in the last 30 years and TV is mostly blamed for that – when you have a generation used to watching more than 6 hours of TV per day, usually presented in chunks of around 12 minutes. So you get gradually conditioned to feel anxiety after doing the same task for 12 minutes or more.

There are two clear examples on how our attention span is getting shorter and shorter: Radio and TV adverstiment air time.

Radio ads in the old days where 60 seconds long, then turned into 30 seconds, 15, and now even 5. We have “Iced coffee at McDonalds” 2 seconds-ads (these two-second format is called “blinks” by Clear Channel). Those take-you-by-surprise ads are the equivalent to maybe the lovely blinking pop-ups on a website?

Television ads have also suffered the shrinking effect. When television started as an advertising medium back in 1971, the standard duration was 60 seconds. After is shrinked the same way radio ads did. There is clearly a race against boredom, by trying to get our attention in smaller chunks. It makes sense; you can hardly be bored in 2 seconds. Yes, maybe we need to prescribe Ritalin to the whole society to treat our ADD (Attention-deficit disorder).

Attention span of a gold fish

If television is to blame for being addictive and diminish our attention span, what can we say about the Internet? What happens when you expose generations of TV Zappers to gazillions of websites at their fingertips?

We become Digital Goldfishes…

“Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things,” says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating,” told the BBC programme Go Digital.

Who wants to watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos” when you got YouTube? Or read a magazine when you can read a blog? Or even better, follow it on Twitter?

When we are on the Internet, our attention span is shorter because we have too many options. As a result it is pretty difficult for a web user to keep focus on one single thing and get the most out of it… we get quickly bored and just jump to another site.

The addictive nature of the Internet and the long hours we spent on it can leave us with an attention span of nine to five seconds -goldfish have nine.

Five seconds to make your web Sticky