As people scroll on social media more and read books less, their ability to focus is weakening, says attention-span researcher Gloria Mark.
Some of her earliest research, published in April 2004, showed that the average person at the time focused their attention on a single screen — to respond to an email or read an online article — for about two and half minutes, she says. That number was 47 seconds in 2016, closer to the length of videos you might find now on social media, says Mark, a Chancellor’s professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine.
More recently, participation in the attention-based practice of reading novels has dipped: Less than half of Americans read just one book over a 12-month period ending in July 2022, according to a Survey of Public Participation in the Arts published in October 2023 by the National Endowment for the Arts. Between 2003 and 2023, the percentage of Americans reading daily for pleasure fell by more than 40%, according to a study from the University of Florida and University College London published in August 2025.
A shrinking attention span can have ripple effects on multiple parts of your life. Not being able to focus correlates with a lower ability to recall information, according to a 2020 study conducted by Stanford University researchers.
