When I was younger, I could sit down and watch a movie all the way through and give it my undivided attention. I never had to be doing something else while the movie was playing. Now, the only way I can listen to a story is if there’s Subway Surfers on the other half of the screen. Our phones and the short form content that we consume have ruined not only our attention spans, but the younger generation’s too. 

If you were to compare the kids movies that were released in the early 2000s to the kids movies of today, you would find drastic differences. Not only are they shorter than they used to be, but the amount of color and action that is packed into these hour long movies is unnecessary and harmful. The graphics and colors in the movies are overstimulating children’s brains and decreasing their attention spans. Yes, kids need to be exposed to colors in order to develop properly, but this is a level of overexposure that actually limits brain function in the long run.

Every social media platform now has a way to consume and produce short form content. The algorithms that run Instagram reels and Tiktok are designed to draw you in and keep you there, meaning every time we watch short social media videos our brains are literally rewired to want more. It’s a vicious cycle in which our attention span decreases and our desire to watch these videos increases, leading us to watch more and focus less. Videos provide highly overstimulating “half-stories”, leading our brain to become overwhelmed with information and eventually causing us to lose the capacity to enter deep focus and limit our cognitive control.

Children and adults are being diagnosed with ADHD and ADD at unprecedented numbers, increasing at a rate much higher than earlier generations. Part of this is due to increased awareness of learning disabilities and higher access to diagnostic tools, but a large part of this is also because people’s brains are being influenced by the media we consume daily in a way that drastically cuts attention spans. Being raised in a digital world means that our brains are constantly exposed to specifically structured media, beginning at an early age, causing many people to develop weaker attention spans than those of earlier generations.