MODERN TIMES
Modern times is a silent movie from 1936 that was written and produced by Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin brilliantly and humorously plays the assembly line employee who is selected to use a new technology device which the Boss thankfully decides that "No, it is not practical"? (see video above).
As I described in my previous blog post, technology often complicates our life, rather than making us more efficient, it sometimes simply makes us stupid.
I assume they meant actual goldfish, not the little cheese crackers.
If they'd tested Americans, you'd figure, what, 2 seconds? On the West Coast. On the East coast, probably one?
Chaplin brilliantly and humorously plays the assembly line employee who is selected to use a new technology device which the Boss thankfully decides that "No, it is not practical"? (see video above).
As I described in my previous blog post, technology often complicates our life, rather than making us more efficient, it sometimes simply makes us stupid.
I assume they meant actual goldfish, not the little cheese crackers.
The research was about attention spans in general, it was designed to test how long humans pay attention to the ads on web pages. And if we're talking about ads, 8.25 seconds strikes me as pretty long.
Which is probably because the test subjects, as it turns out, were all Canadians. Who are genetically patient.
If they'd tested Americans, you'd figure, what, 2 seconds? On the West Coast. On the East coast, probably one?
Anyway, they concluded that for people to pay attention to ads, the ads have to have movement. Because our peripheral vision is hard wired to respond to movement as a way to alert us to predators.
So now more and more ads are like action films, and here's the irony: these elaborate ads need massive amounts of data, so while you're waiting for this irresistible attention grabbing action packed ad to load, you're watching a download bar on your computer.
What the researchers should have measured is not how long are you willing to look at an ad, but how long you're willing to look at a download bar. I'm betting it's way less than eight seconds, even for a Canadian.
And now congratulate yourself for concentrating long enough to make it through this article.
