Should we be concerned that (according to Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California Irvine) in 2004 people averaged two and a half minutes on any screen before switching tasks, but by 2016 that had fallen to 47 seconds?
So far today, I have scanned over a hundred email headers at about one second each before hitting the delete button and I have opened a couple of dozen for a quick look at the contents lasting maybe ten seconds before I figured I knew what the main point was. So even restricting to the screens I actually opened I could spend up to 15 minutes on the one that I found interesting before bringing my average time per screen up to 47 seconds.
A reduction in the maximum time that people can spend on one topic might be cause for concern, but the ability to quickly scan many sources may actually be valuable even though it brings down the average time per screen.
What is more concerning to me is the design of pages that maintain unwarranted engagement for the benefit of advertisers rather than those that encourage rapid switching.
And with regard to non-text modes, I know of none that beats text for the purpose of scanning content. So I generally avoid video and auditory input except when I have decided that I really do need to engage more deeply with the material.
Source: What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays