Last year, the Consumer Insights team at Microsoft released a startling study about online attention spans. The findings—that we’re becoming less attentive as result of increasing digital activity—did not come as a shock. What was a surprise was how far we’ve come: The average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just eight today.
That’s one second less than the attention span of a goldfish, the study said.
The decline strikes us as a sign of another trend: the....