Ken Burns refutes the common complaint that attention spans are shrinking. He points to binge-watching culture—where viewers consume entire seasons of shows in a weekend—as definitive proof that audiences still have an appetite for deep, long-form content. He notes this panic is not new, citing the telegraph's arrival in the 1850s.
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Accepting the narrative that attention spans are shrinking is dangerous. It can lead educators and creators to give up on encouraging deep, focused tasks like reading long novels, thereby causing the very outcome they fear by lowering their expectations and standards.
Despite competing with short-form content like TikTok, Ken Burns' long documentaries succeed because they are built on compelling storytelling. This challenges the myth of shrinking attention spans, suggesting instead that audiences demand more engaging content, regardless of its length.
Critics lament declining focus, yet popular video games like Baldur's Gate 3 demand 75+ hours of intense concentration. This is over five times longer than Wagner's entire Ring Cycle opera, a historical benchmark for sustained cultural attention, quantitatively refuting the attention decline narrative.
The same technologies accused of shortening attention spans are also creating highly obsessive micro-tribes and fandoms. This contradicts the narrative of a universal decline in focus, suggesting a shift in what we pay attention to, not an inability to focus.
The concept of a universal "attention span" is a myth. How long we focus depends on our motivation for a specific task, not a finite mental capacity that gets depleted. This reframes poor attention from an innate inability to a lack of interest or desire.
Instead of everything simply getting dumber, media is splitting into two extremes. Both hyper-short (four-second videos) and hyper-long (four-hour podcasts) content are thriving. It is the middle-length, moderately complex content that is being hollowed out as audiences gravitate towards the poles.
The next marketing wave isn't chasing viral trends, which builds trend recall but not brand recall. Instead, brands must create immersive, episodic 'worlds' that function as standalone entertainment. This shifts the goal from grabbing attention to holding it through compelling, serialized content.
Netflix's content strategy has adapted to the reality of dual-screen viewing. Realizing audiences are often on their phones, they produce shows that are easy to follow in the background. This involves constant plot "signposting" so a distracted viewer can look up and immediately understand what's happening.
Ken Burns reveals that the true value of PBS is not just funding, but the luxury of time. He claims he could secure a $30 million budget from a streaming service in a single pitch meeting, but only PBS would grant him the decade required to produce a definitive work like his Vietnam series.
Long novels, now the gold standard for deep focus, were once considered dangerous “junk food” that distracted people from prayer and duty. This historical pattern suggests our current panic over digital media may be similarly shortsighted and lacking perspective.