The time we spend focusing on any one thing is getting smaller. With the rise of social media, and its videos lasting only a few seconds, or the rush of the modern world always pulling our attention in so many directions, we rarely get the opportunity to give meaningful, prolonged time to any one experience.
Studies suggest that our screen time is a significant contributing factor to our shrinking attention spans. Studies show that, in 2004, we spent an average of two and a half minutes focusing on one page on a screen, for example, a Word document, before looking away, perhaps to check an email. By 2012, this dropped by half, to 75 seconds, and another decade later it shrank to an average of 40 seconds1.
This has implications for both our workplace productivity and our ability to focus on leisure activities. Multitasking comes with a cost, known as a switch cost2. Every time you switch your attention to something new, you need to orient to that activity, to find the page you were reading, or remember your next point in that paragraph you were writing, or which item you needed to complete a half-finished task.
Shorter attention spans and more divided attentions also have serious implications for our health, with research indicating that our stress levels and blood pressure increase the faster or more frequently our attention switches. So, the more our attention is divided, the bigger the cost we pay, and the currency of this payment is our health and our time.
As our moments of focus contract into ever-smaller fragments, it can feel as though time itself is shrinking3. Yet, there are pockets of resistance, pushing back this temporal theft and reminding us of the vast expanse of time. One such act of rebellion is a work of art, a composition one thousand years long: Longplayer.
As our moments of focus contract into ever-smaller fragments, it can feel as though time itself is shrinking3. Yet, there are pockets of resistance, pushing back this temporal theft and reminding us of the vast expanse of time. One such act of rebellion is a work of art, a composition one thousand years long: Longplayer.
Created by composer and computer scientist Jem Finer in 1999, Longplayer is an artistic response to the brevity of modern life. While many were satisfied to celebrate the millennium with a New Year's Eve party and a few half-jokes about a Y2K bug, Finer had a different idea. He wanted us to reflect, insofar as we can, on the expanse of one thousand years, on the incredible vastness of that temporal distance.
Beginning at midnight on December 31st, 1999, Longplayer set in motion a piece of music designed to play continuously for 1,000 years, without ever repeating. Each note is intricately woven, according to simple but precise rules, into an endless cycle, unfolding across centuries. On December 31st, 2999, if all goes as planned, the piece will return to its beginning, completing its long temporal journey.
The beauty of this project lies not only in the music itself, but in the optimism upon which it was built. In the face of uncertainty for the future, with worsening climate change, global conflict and an ever more unstable political landscape, Longplayer holds hope for the endurance of humanity. It reminds us, in a world increasingly obsessed with the instant, that time can be long, and it can be vast. Perhaps most importantly, though, it pushes us to imagine a future where our species still exists, in a thousand years, to hear the final note ring out from the top of a London lighthouse.
You can listen to Longplayer via an online stream here. Longplayer has a permanent home at London’s only lighthouse, located at Trinity Buoy Wharf. At the time of writing, other listening posts include Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), and The Long Now Foundation Museum (San Francisco).
1 https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans
2 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201209/the-true-cost-of-multi-tasking
3 This is backed by cognitive models of time perception. See Wittmann, 2015, ‘Modulations of the experience of self and time’, in Consciousness and Cognition (38).
Other sources: https://longplayer.org/about/ , https://longplayer.org/about/conceptual-background/