This is just a blog to point out the obvious.
Nearly everyone has noticed that our attention span has become much shorter because of the Internet.
That is not my observation. My observation is that as information becomes more abundant, as intelligence proliferates and as we have ready access to facts, that we have changed the nature of our communication.
We communicate important and useful information in much shorter segments.
To someone who has been reading fiction from the past few centuries this pattern is visible. The great novel of Moby Dick is filled with long rambling arcane sections on every imaginable type of information that was interesting to someone in 1850. Contemporary fiction, such as is common in Japan, has almost no background, scene setting, or similar baroque digressions.
Business letters by the end of the 20th century were curt and to the point. The opposite of the beginning of the 20th century. They were flowery and long.
The reason is straightforward. As our common knowledge and education expands, our ability to grasp new information requires less background and support. If we need to know something, we can look it up quickly on our smartphone.
The best example of the institutionalization of this reality is the fact that most TED talks, that are widely circulated as intelligent comments, are only 10 min. long.