Could Movies Actually Increase Attention Spans?
Growing our ability to focus on longer-format visual offerings
As I was coming of age, cassettes were still around but CDs were slowly becoming more accessible. I can remember owning many cassettes and growing up with those being the primary way I heard music. Slowly, CDs replaced any cassettes I owned and they became the sole way I listened to music.
Recently I was struck with the thought that cassettes actually forced you to savor the artists you were listening to. Sure, there were buttons to fast-forward and rewind, but those took a bit of effort. Sometimes it was just easier to play through songs to get to your favorite.
However, something would often occur while ‘playing through’ songs. Sometimes you’d discover less popular offerings from your artist and actually enjoy them as well. The neglected songs moved into a category of appreciation.
As CDs grew in popularity, the way we listened to music changed. CDs offered clearer sound and convenience, but we lost some things as well. Some of the draw-backs were scratches that made the disc unplayable or how easily CD players would skip from the slightest bump. But there was something in the art that was lost as well. We seemed to shift from savoring some of the musical offerings to consuming them. The skip button allowed us to easily move to the next track, ensuring that some tracks would never receive the opportunity to be played. As I grew older, I had friends who would skip a song part-way through. They couldn’t waste time to listen to the entire 3 minute track, they needed to get a 45 second hit from those notes and move on to the next one.
What does all of this have to do with movies? I get the sense that this is some of the mindset many of us - and younger generations - take into watching movies. While we might not be fast-forwarding through movies, are we savoring the art before us?
Television vs. Movies
Another big change in my lifetime was the made-for-TV-movie, verses the movies that would play in your local theater. If a movie was made for TV, that was a signal - to me, at least - that this movie wasn’t good enough to make it to the big leagues of the box office. If it was any good, it would be at the movie theater.
I think the two TV shows that truly changed television were Lost and 24. For the first time, people were starting to talking about the ‘movie-quality’ of these shows. Fast-forward to today (pun intended) and people seem to prefer serialized shows over movies.
Of course, TV has morphed into something entirely different from the cable network concept many of us grew up with, but, it seems that many people prefer episodes to longer-format movies. There are good aspects to this.
For one, many of the offerings from episodic shows have allowed storytellers to slow down and really develop characters. This is a major disadvantage for movies, because they have +/- two hours to unveil their story.
At the same time, many of us are growing accustom to the 45-minute episode (or shorter for sitcoms). A lean movie is 90 mins. Others can push into 120 mins. or even 180 mins. (Oppenheimer was right at 180 and John Wick 4 was 170).
Not too long ago I talked about the growing boredom towards movies, and this might be a subtle aspect to that. The practice of dual-screens are decreasing attention spans and maybe some of this is giving way to our desire for shorter run-times for what we’re going to watch. Are our minds becoming inclined towards shorter format stories?
Stating the obvious, reels and TikTok are the norm for many videos we consume - oftentimes occurring during the shows we watch (see: dual-screens). Even finding clips from movies on YouTube might be a way many of us consume movies.
There was a time when people were concerned about movies depleting our attention spans, I guess there’s still concern with that. However, perhaps we’re at a point in our culture where movies might actually grow our attention spans. Is the practice of sitting down to a 90 or 120 minute film a way to steward the brains of a future generation?
I don’t know. But if you actually read to this point in the article, good for you. Your attention span might be a bit longer than most. Why don’t you reward yourself by watching a reel?
I'd be curious to trace this back even further than movies. Prior to motion pictures, what sorts of story-telling formats were used? What lengths did they tend to span? And how did they affect attention spans?
I think the obvious precursor is theater. I wonder about thinking as far back as cultural storytelling traditions outside of that, too... like sitting around campfires telling stories, etc.
Different storytelling formats affect attention differently, though, too, so it does become more complex. Movies are more stimulating than hearing someone tell stories around a campfire.