"You settle in for a quick scroll through your feed, maybe just to unwind for a minute or two. But somewhere between a cooking hack and a clip you've already forgotten, forty minutes vanished. It's all a blur. Welcome to the era of infinite content and finite attention, where our brains are working overtime just to keep up with the deluge."
"Here's the uncomfortable truth: our ability to focus is dwindling at a startling rate. According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, the average attention span on any screen has plummeted from around two and a half minutes in 2004 to just 47 seconds in recent years. That's not a typo. Forty-seven seconds. The median is even lower at 40 seconds, which means half of the time we're switching our focus faster than it takes to microwave popcorn."
"Before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, that figure was hovering around 5%. A separate study from Ahrefs painted an even more dramatic picture, finding that a staggering 74% of newly created web pages in April 2025 contained AI-generated content. Meanwhile, research published on arXiv suggested that roughly a third to almost half of the text on active web pages now originates from AI sources."
Rapid, habitual scrolling causes large amounts of time to pass unnoticed and reduces sustained focus. Average attention span on screens dropped from about two and a half minutes in 2004 to roughly 47 seconds recently, with a median near 40 seconds, causing more frequent task switching. AI-generated material now makes up a substantial portion of online written content, rising from around 5% before ChatGPT to over half in recent analyses; one study found 74% of newly created pages in April 2025 contained AI output and other research estimates a third to almost half of active pages contain AI text. The content surge compounds cognitive overload and memory lapses.
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