Mass media and the internet have caused people’s attention spans to get shorter. However, the overall effect has been positive: while people are less able to focus on one thing, they more than make up for it with an enhanced ability to sort through large

In today's age of hyper-connectivity, attention spans have grown shorter. In fact, many behavioral analysts have stated human attention as an important and scarce resource. As internet speeds continue to improve and computers (and phones) get smaller and faster, our patience has dwindled. And since we interact with these devices almost all day, it has had a significant impact on the way we interact and perceive our environment.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc are few of the social networking websites which enjoy a worldwide membership and have had a significant impact on our lifestyles. For those who do not have the time and patience to follow the news in detail prefer to quickly read a 140 character "summary" on Twitter. Instead of reading a satire on a political event, there's a preference to go through humourous one-liners. While that encourages a creativity of a restrictive type, it's nevertheless become a standard to get humour in small sentences which suit our diminishing attention spans.

Facebook, Instagram and other photo sharing websites have promoted a different kind of interaction. If picture or a video is uploaded, (and since people are always online) it's popularity and sometimes it's "aesthetic appeal" is almost always judged by the number of 'likes' or 'hearts' it receives in a short span of time. After perhaps a day it's mostly forgotten and people often move on to other, more interesting, attention grabbing activities or events.

A lot of entrepreneurs are capitalizing on our ever dwindling attention span. Online dating is now all about a quick right or a left swipe. If you find the person attractive on the small screen of your phone, you swipe right and accept them or else you swipe left and move on. Many interactive applications have been designed to help a person learn and constantly focus on one activity so as to help them improve their productivity.

However, being exposed to such a barrage of information in such a short span of time has also improved our ability to quickly sift through unnecessary or unimportant posts and pinpoint that which we find helpful. In fact, this has been touted as an important skill and is being tested everywhere as a specific skill which prospective employers or institutes look out for and offer. This has also given rise to a new field of work and study also termed as "Big Data" - where large amounts of information is studied and specific and useful patterns are deduced.

The layman probably does not require this exacting skill as they probably does not encounter as much data but nevertheless, in they world of thousands of information generated by his circle, it possibly helps him out to decide what is important, who is important and in some ways helps him in being productive. Sometimes, they might develop an attention to detail which could be beneficial.