Twitterpated - the short attention span of the internet

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to the podcast MacBreak Weekly with Leo Laporte (of Tech TV fame) and he talked about switching from Twitter.com to a similar service.

I checked out Leo's blog, Twitter, and the other site in question (sorry can't remember the name) to see what the big deal was. The idea is simple: the site asks the question "What are you doing?" and gives you the space for a very short answer. Anyone interested in the answer can subscribe to the RSS feed.

What Twitter does and my opinion of it are not important here. What is important in this discussion is the reaction in Leo's blog in reaction to his announcement he was switching. One commenter made the comment that he hadn't tried Twitter yet. He was immediately flamed for "Not keeping up." After all, Twitter had been up and running for a whole four weeks at the time the comment was posted. It's old news. Time to move onto something newer and cooler.

Is that really our culture's attention span? Four weeks until something cool and new and revolutionary becomes "old news"?

Four weeks - a little less than a month. No wonder everyone is being pulled into so many things like RSS feeds, email, blogs and news sites. Constantly checking to see if there is anything new. People are so afraid of missing the next Twitter they are just consuming all this junk information from the Internet firehouse of information instead of reading or doing something useful.

I've heard the average millionaire focuses on planning 2 - 5 years or longer. Apparently the average person focuses 4 weeks or less. Most likely the average person focuses on the upcoming weekend. No wonder most people aren't happy with the way their life turned out. They are living on accident, floating from one thing to the next.