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b'Have you heard? \\n\\n\\n\\nThe average human attention span is now shorter than a goldfish\\u2019s! Thanks, internet.\\xa0 TV journalists and politicians talk to us in sound bites, assuming we don\\u2019t have the attention for more nuanced analysis. Boomers bemoan fast media like TikTok and Instagram.\\xa0 It seems like attention might be one of our scarcest and most precious resources.\\n\\n\\n\\nBut I\\u2019m starting to wonder whether attention is really a scarce resource. Perhaps what is truly scarce are media and messages worth paying attention to. Before I get into the latter, let\\u2019s debunk the former. \\n\\n\\n\\nIt turns out that the panic over our attention spans being less than a goldfish\\u2019s is a pseudo-scientific soundbite in and of itself. \\n\\n\\n\\nActual research psychologists say they don\\u2019t really study \\u201cattention span\\u201d as a discrete component of how we think. Instead, attention span is relative. How long we can pay attention to something depends on the task, our level of interest, and the varied circumstances we bring to a given situation. For instance, I might be able to work on an essay for hours at a time because I\\u2019m fascinated by the subject and in a creative flow. But on another day, even though my interest hasn\\u2019t changed, I might not be able to sustain 5 minutes of distraction-free work because I didn\\u2019t get enough sleep or I\\u2019m feeling anxious about something.\\n\\n\\n\\nWhat\\u2019s more, according to a BBC article debunking this \\u201ccommon knowledge\\u201d about goldfish and attention spans, goldfish do actually have the ability to pay attention! Scientists have been studying fish for over 100 years to get a better idea of how memories are formed and how learning happens\\u2014precisely because fish are able to \\u201cpay attention\\u201d long enough to do both.\\n\\n\\n\\nSo, it turns out that scientists agree that given the right task and the right circumstances, we have an abundance of attention. \\n\\n\\n\\nThat\\u2019s not to say that we don\\u2019t also have personal, neurological, and systemic challenges with paying attention. But it is to say that, as marketers, we don\\u2019t need to fight for our own slice of attention tartlet. How, then, could we approach marketing and business-building differently?\\n\\n\\n\\nBusiness owners tell me about how hard it is to reach people on a regular basis. How hard it is to get people\\u2019s attention. These business owners try to keep up with the algorithm changes, the trends that are going viral, and the memes that get noticed. This complaint is a red flag \\U0001f6a9. That\\u2019s a meme joke.\\xa0\\n\\n\\n\\nAlgorithms and memes aren\\u2019t the way to access an abundance of attention. \\n\\n\\n\\nAnd when gaming the algorithm and leveraging the memes does pay off? That attention is precarious\\u2014fleeting. The attention we do get paid is more like an impulse purchase rather than a long-term investment. Many people today have a greater supply of money than they do time. So getting someone to pay attention\\u2014which is a function of time\\u2014might be harder than getting them to pay currency.\\n\\n\\n\\nAnd yet, it\\u2019s understood that the work we create for the payment of attention doesn\\u2019t have to be as high quality as work that people pay money for. Quality attention requires quality work. When we make work designed to satisfy the demands of the algorithm, we\\u2019re rarely making work that satisfies the interests of the people we want to connect with. Just because something gets likes or reach doesn\\u2019t mean people are really paying attention.\\n\\n\\n\\nToday, the mediascape is very different from when I became a blogger and social media user back in 2009. \\n\\n\\n\\nPlatforms were real channels for sharing whatever it was that you wanted to put online.'