When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Are you turning into digital goldfish?

Daniel Fleshbourne Administrator Neowin @dfleshbourne · Mar 6, 2002 11:23 EST with -1 comments

Thanks Erichiwaann

If you are spending too much time on the internet and are concerned that it is affecting your concentration, you are not alone. The addictive nature of web browsing can leave you with an attention span of nine seconds - the same as a goldfish.

"Our attention span gets affected by the way we do things," says Ted Selker, an expert in the online equivalent of body language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. If we spend our time flitting from one thing to another on the web, we can get into a habit of not concentrating," he told the BBC programme Go Digital.

With literally millions of websites at our fingertips, the attention span of the average web surfer is measured in seconds.

"When I'm on the internet, my attention span is shorter for each thing because there are so many things to choose from," said one American web browser.

News source: bbc news