The shrinking attention span is often taken to mean that people are, by and large, getting dumber, as they are unable to focus their attention on things for very long. It's generally presented as a fact, though in my search for the source of this information, I haven't been able to find satisfactory substantiation - but more to the point, my sense is that this assumption is merely a dodge used by people who don't have anything worthwhile to say to blame others for not listening to them.
It's particularly true of marketing, as I was reminded when reading a blog in which someone was bemoaning the fact that advertisers are now having to cut commercials back to a mere fifteen seconds because people are incapable of paying attention to a thirty-second spot, which itself was reduced from a full minute not very long ago. Nowhere in this post was there any consideration of the content of the message or it's relevance to its audience - the writer presumed that whatever he had to say was worth listening to and, if people didn't give him their full attention, it's their fault rather than his.
Consider this: time is a far more precious commodity in the present day than in years past and people have learned to spend it wisely, not give it away to anyone who wants it. And now more than in the past, people are selective about what they will permit to take their time. To be clear: if your intended audience doesn't pay attention to your message, it doesn't mean they lack the ability pay attention - it means that you lack the ability to offer them anything that is worth their time.
Statistics presented by educational designers is that the average person can manage to pay close attention to a speaker for a span of 15 to 20 minutes if no audiovisual aids are used to break up the monotony, noting that this duration has not changed significantly since the phenomenon was studied in the 1960s. I'll have to concede that these claims are not well substantiated either, but they seem far more reasonable: a person will give their attention to a television program (in which they are interested) for long periods of time between commercial breaks (which are unwanted interruptions). If anything, the complaint is voiced that there are too many breaks in the content in which viewers are interested.
I'd suggest that the human attention span is much longer even than that, but it likely depends on the presentation method and the level of interest of the audience. The average person can easily become engrossed in a two- or three-hour film, video gamers will play a single session that can go on for six or eight hours, and an avid reader can stay engrossed in a good, thick book for even longer.
And so, the fact that people don't pay attention to advertisements cannot be reasonably mistaken as evidence that they lack the ability pay attention to something that is relevant and interesting - it's just that for most things, especially mass-broadcast commercial messaging, it is neither relevant no interesting. The fact that a person can now recognize that something is irrelevant more quickly likely means that people have gotten smarter rather than dumber in their ability to make a faster decision as to whether a message that's being inflicted on them is worth the time and attention.
To the marketer or designer, understand that if your message is relevant and meaningful, people will give you their attention for quite a long time; and more importantly, that if your message is neither relevant nor meaningful, people won't give you their attention, and they will make this decision very quickly - or said another way, the contemporary consumer can recognize an irrelevant message in less time than consumers of previous generations.
Ultimately, marketers must stop blaming the audience for the fact that they are not paying attention. Alleged lack of intelligence on the part of the listener is merely a convenient diversion for failure of the speaker. And further, so long as you scapegoat the audience, you will likely never seek, find, or accept that the real reason people aren't paying attention likely has more to do with your message, your channel, your timing, your target market, or something other than the human attention span.
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