Source: IMDB

Noelle’s post last Wednesday about the pros and cons of art museum interactivity really made me pay attention. The following is what I’ve been thinking.

I remember back in school hearing about how the average adult attention span is about twenty minutes. I’m not sure how that number was derived but I can tell you that sometimes it seems awfully high given my experience with analyzing our website and its “time on page” numbers. However, while twenty minutes may seem high, I know that over the weekend I sat through the new Pierre Morel movie, “Taken,” which I’ll admit didn’t require a whole lot of advanced paying attention skills, and was surprised to find out how badly I had to use the restroom once the end credits started to roll, i.e. my brain was so tuned in to Liam Neeson chopping his way through a torrent of bad guys that I didn’t even register my body’s need to release a torrent of processed Coca-Cola.

With this recent movie experience in mind, and what I’ll assume are pretty standard “time on page” numbers for your average website, I’m going to loosely conclude that it’s the wrapping and expression (medium if you will) of the content that determines how long it will keep a person’s attention. In these cases, movies wrap content in such a way that makes my adult brain want to pay attention for more than twenty minutes and the Internet wraps content in such a way that I’m done in seconds. Read the rest of this entry »