Headlines

April 2025 

The pope died today.  I’m not sure of the cause.  I know he was in the hospital a while ago. But I am not certain exactly why.  He had a visit with our vice president yesterday, maybe that had something to do with it.  The headline seemed to make it appear that the two things were correlated somehow.  I just don’t know.  Not that I don’t care.  I am sympathetic to all who mourn the Pope.  But he was older and accomplished.  I’m not sure there is a higher pinnacle in the religious world he could have reached.  I am certain he must have led an exemplary life and exceeded his own expectations of himself and likely his family’s.

I see Donald Trump continues to piss people off, especially as the stock market persists with its recent plummet. I also know that P Diddy has been having some legal issues and has been naughty enough to get some jail time.  But I’m not sure I know exactly what the deal is.  Likely something pretty bad.  I don’t know who won the Boston Marathon, but I know it’s done. It’s like that with a lot of things.  I know of them, but not much else.

I am not proud of this.  I am a man that likes detail and deep diving on topics.  If you have ever read anything I have written you know that this is so.  But recently, I have become a bit of a headline guy. So, I am pondering why this is.  Because frankly, I am deeply troubled by it.  Not just for me, but for society in general. There is so much to know beyond the headlines.  In fact, they can provide a skewed view of a story and of the world we live in.  They all too often become the story itself.

Why do people only read headlines? Well, we all seem to have shorter attention spans, that’s why.  In my deep dive on the topic, yes, I took the time to research this, I read that currently they are at an all-time low. Experts suspect that the digital information era has reduced our attention spans from ~12 seconds in the year 2000, to ~8 seconds today. That is an incredible 30% reduction!  I also heard that this is even less than a goldfish’s attention span. Which, by the way, is allegedly 9 seconds. I researched multiple sources, so I could confirm this trivial fact.

So, how does our shortening attention span contribute to the likelihood of us not reading past the headline?  Or is it the headlines themselves that keep us from doing so?  It is my guess that it’s a little of both. Generally, we are rushing through what we are reading because we are all in a hurry.  Not even thinking, we just cruise through and absorb information via the headlines, because we have too little time to go into depth on anything. Or too little patience.  Or can’t pay attention for that long.

The problem is, when we do this, if the headline aligns with our concept of reality, rather than read more to get details and maybe even facts, we extrapolate the story in our heads and accept this extrapolation, as fact.  The more gripping, shocking or gut wrenching the headline is, the better. In fact, we are getting really good at combining headlines into stories of their own.

We even tend to share articles where we only read the headline. I’m quite sad to say I have done this. We may think we are just sharing something that looks interesting, and someone else may value it.  But really what it turns out to be is a means of acting like we know something.  We try, consciously or not, to re-impose our cemented beliefs on others. Not with facts but with superfluous headlinery. We might not even agree with what the article says, because we don’t even know what it says!  But we send it along anyway.  So others can read the headline and extrapolate. Then they think, what they are thinking, is what we think.  Can you not see the danger in this?

I know, I know, we are all way too busy to read everything that grabs our interest. No one denies that.  Nowadays, we all have loads of stuff going on and tons of fodder to sift through.  That’s called information overload, and it leads to just reading banners and headlines and not going any further.  Even if we wanted to, it’s not generally a priority.  Focusing on a singular topic can be difficult, when we’re given so many headline options to choose from. And in the age of the internet, an instantaneous number of choices are always within our reach. 

While instant access to so much content is a good thing, our diminishing attention span has affected our desire for an in-depth analysis of the information we get. Sadly, this makes it easy and convenient to assume the headline is true. Like the pope did die from visiting with our Vice President. And he was a stalwart human being with a proud family.  I made that up.  Like we all do.  He might have been a real asshole. Probably not, but how do we know?

It’s much easier to extrapolate than to read both articles to understand the real specifics. This is a bit concerning, as masses of people are forming opinions based solely on sensationalized headlines.  Which provide only partial information, or lead to false narratives.  Including me, it seems. We live in a world where people often only believe what they want to believe. Simply ignoring facts that are inconvenient. That is why it is so easy to get steered by the headline and forego the details.

Experts now believe that our brains can no longer keep up with the sheer quantity of information, news, and social media content that competes for our attention. This is unlikely to ever end, as we are wired to seek information, and the internet has an infinite supply of new stuff for us to digest daily. We have been forced to train ourselves to split our focus and shortchanged our ability to pay attention. Eight seconds is not a very long time, by the way.

We also have a strong desire for immediate gratification.  Therefore, we are forced to adapt a strategy of short bursts of focus before moving onto the next thing. Before scanning for something that catches our 8 seconds of interest.  Like headlines and reels and Instagram posts and on and on and on. TikTok was designed specifically for this.  Or because of it.

Regardless, we are at a crossroads with information exchange.  With AI joining the fray, things are about to get ugly.  No, they are already ugly.  With Trump and P-Diddy hanging out and the VP knocking off the Pope.  We gotta get our shit together! I’m sorry if that pissed you off.  With your attention span being less than a goldfish, I am quite certain you haven’t read this far anyway!  But you probably shared this with someone else, so they would not read it as well.