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News If you are reading this article on a website, you may not even finish the sentence. New research gathered by a Scots academic suggests that people logging on to a web page will decide in just one 20th of a second whether they want to stay. If a web page is outstanding in its allure, the surfer may stay all of 45 seconds. The brutal world of new media is sketched out in a course that has been organised by Glasgow Caledonian University. Dr Mary Thomson, a psychologist who specialises in decision-making, teaches companies and web entrepreneurs how to cling on to the fickle internet audience. The web is, of course, just the latest manifestation of a voracious media culture that assails people on all sides - through television, film, computers, mobile phones and outdoor hoardings. The rock band U2 parodied this world in its Zoo TV tour, the stage festooned with screens which deluged the audience with endlessly changing images. But researchers are increasingly wondering whether the electronic maelstrom we live in has long-term implications for our ability to concentrate. The issue was deftly summed up by the advertising guru Maurice Saatchi, who suggests that the brains of the young are rewiring themselves to respond to the constant media onslaught. "This apparently is what makes it possible for a modern teenager, in the 30 seconds of a normal TV commercial, to take a phone call, send a text, receive a photo, play a game, download a music track, read a magazine and watch commercials at six times the speed," he said. The result of this media glut, and the continuously partial attention it seems to create, isn't necessarily good news for admen like Saatchi, who, with his brother Charles, founded the eponymous agency. Memory recall scores for TV advertisements one day after screening have collapsed from 35 per cent in the 1960s to just 10 per cent today. Despite watching more, we may be remembering less: research from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB), the UK's TV measurement body, suggests that by the age of 75, the average Briton will have spent It even has gender significance. Dr Thomson says: "Men tend to view one or two areas at a time and process the information, but women tend to have this comprehensive ability to process lots of information at once." Glasgow Caledonian's study of e-commerce outlines one practical consequence of this tendency. "Men are motivated to buy something quickly and not mess about when they shop. For women, it is related to their desires and needs," says Dr Thomson. What is still sketchy is what effect the omnipresent electronic media have on their most skilled adepts, children and young people. BARB estimates that those aged 11 to 15 now spend 55 per cent of their waking lives - or seven and a half hours a day - watching television and computers, an increase of 40 per cent in a decade. Scotland's biggest teaching union, the EIS, believes media saturation is having an effect in the classroom. A spokesman for the union said: "Most teachers would certainly agree that the average attention span of young people is decreasing, with implications for learning and teaching. "It is difficult to pinpoint precise reasons for this, although many would suspect that television and other mass media are a factor. What is certain is that shortening attention spans in many pupils creates real challenges for teachers." The debate about the media is not a simplistic one about dumbing down - no-one disputes that television, certainly in the UK, broadcasts intellectually aspirational programmes - as perhaps the way it is packaged to compete for our attention. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the media itself is changing. The consequences of our media- saturated world are felt by those who use it as a marketing tool. Neale Gilhooley, head of the Edinburgh-based branding agency Evolution Design, said: "We have noticed that the old advertising model of AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) no longer fully applies; there just is not time. "I think our attention span started to diminish with the invention of the TV remote control." Are all media equally culpable? As the internet, the newest form of media, took off in the mid-Nineties, evangelists hailed it as a highly educational resource on which all knowledge could be accessed - after all in 1995 you could take a virtual tour of the Louvre. However, academics such as Clifford Stoll, a leading computer scientist, have questioned that premise. In 1996 Stoll wrote the controversial Silicon Snake Oil, which was one of the first books to question some of the adulatory claims being made about the internet. Stoll says on his own website: "The internet provides a vast amount of data. But there's a wide gulf between data and information. There's a long distance from information to knowledge."
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