If you are a frequent user of Twitter, you might not be doing so well in the love department…
Frequent Twitter users have shorter relationships than people who don’t use the social-networking site, OkCupid, the online dating site and Daily Beast partner, found in a survey. Jessica Bennett on why thinking in 140-character bursts is shrinking our love lives. Plus, 10 charts about sex.
In an age where 140-character tweets have replaced talking on the telephone, where job and work and social life are multitasked between 19 open browsers, the idea that our attention spans are shrinking has become pretty well accepted. Last year, two Northwestern professors documented how the 15-second TV spot had come to replace lengthier, more in-depth (and by in-depth we mean 30-second) advertisements—an effort to match attention spans of the majority of viewers. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, has described how modern technology has pushed so many distractions on us that it’s possible we’ll never have our attention spans return. “It used to be that the most valuable thing on the planet was time,” John Greening, the Northwestern prof conducting the ad study, said at the time. “And now the most valuable thing on the planet is attention.”