In response to the alarmingly small attention spans of their students, who would rather engage with smartphones and other devices than pay attention in class, some teachers have tried a new approach to capture their students’ attention.
These teachers teach alongside the types of stimulating visuals the students are accustomed to.
“Today the students weren’t on their phones/distracted. They were listening to me and watching the screen,” read the captions during a viral TikTok video. It seems as if other teachers have found this approach effective, as well.
The idea of restless Gen Alpha kids whose young attention spans have already been flushed so far down the Skibidi Toilet that they can’t possibly comprehend something unless it’s presented alongside Subway Surfers gameplay is funny. The satirists have already gotten to it:
But even as a Millennial adult, I must admit that I get the appeal. The mundane day-to-day activities of life just can’t compete with content that is specifically designed to capture your attention. With this type of content more readily accessible than ever before, on more devices than ever before, it’s no wonder that everything else feels unbearably boring by comparison.
I remember the moment I realized, back when my graduate school classes moved online to Zoom during COVID, that I could supplement the lecture with music from Spotify. With the volume reduced, I could listen to the music while taking in the words of the professor. And since I was muted on Zoom, none would be the wiser. It felt like I had cracked the Matrix, dude.
At that moment I was consuming two pieces of content at the same time: the lecture and the music. I suppose we can debate how literally simultaneous such consumption is – perhaps we as humans can truly focus only on one thing at a time, but we can rapidly shift our attention. However, the time it takes to shift my ear’s attention between spoken language and music is brief enough that it feels simultaneous.
This is a different experience from, say, listening to a podcast while driving a car. The part of your brain that handles driving is mostly separate from the part that processes sound. Different senses are being engaged: you see the road, you touch the steering wheel, you listen to the words. What I am getting at, by contrast, is when you begin to split individual senses up. When you realize that the part of the brain that processes spoken language is different from the part that processes instrumental music, for example.
Or when you realize, as Sony did, that human vision can be divided between what is in front of us and what is in our periphery.
Sony has patented a design for a VR headset where part of the field of view displays a game and part of it displays advertisements. This suggests an information architecture where content is classified by which corner of the user’s eye it targets.
The bad guys in the movie Ready Player One had a similar idea:
What do we call this kind of content? Micro-sensory content? ADHD content? Slop content? No, I’ve got something funnier: “goonable content.”
I’m well aware that the word “goon,” in its modern popularized internet usage, is used to describe the simultaneous consumption of… a certain kind of content. To “goon” is to enter the supposed state of euphoria when one purposefully overstimulates oneself, hitting their dopamine receptors like a speed bag, covering every square inch of their physical environment in computer monitors, television screens, artwork, or posters of… a certain kind of content… so that the microsecond their attention begins to flag, it takes only the most minimal contraction of an extraocular muscle to feel stimulated once more.
However, when I use the word, I’m not necessarily implying that it’s that kind of content. It can be content of any kind.
“Don’t design content. Design gooncaves.” – Steve Jobs, probably
Here’s what I’ve got for a working definition: “Goonable content is content that is designed to be consumed by part of a human sense, oftentimes simultaneously with other content.”
Divide (Your Senses) & Conquer (Your Attention)
Not all content that is gooned was designed to be goonable.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was not designed to be played alongside The Wizard of Oz, but people goon those two pieces of content nonetheless.
(Now, is watching a film with its intended soundtrack an act of gooning? I would argue that it isn’t, because those are not distinct pieces of content. They are each parts of a unified experience created by the director (or, you may as well say, the “information architect”).)
I’ll give another example: Recently I’ve found myself lying on my couch at night with YouTube both on the TV in front of me and on the smartphone screen in my hand. Sometimes this is like a way for me to “open a new tab” in real life… I browse for what I want to watch next on the smartphone app while listening/passively watching the video on the TV.
But there are other times when I’ll play different videos on both devices, letting my attention drift between the two. Those two videos were not designed to be gooned – that is, to be consumed simultaneously with other, distinct content by overlapping their visuals/audio/tactility/etc. – but I gooned them nonetheless.
Is this behavior the product of a shattered attention span? Yeah, probably. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a reality for many, especially for the most chronically online – many of whom have never known anything different their entire lives.
The reality of diminishing attention spans means that we will need to change the way we design content. This goes beyond the near-constant jump cuts and zooms in-and-out that characterize the Gen Z video editing style. This means designing around the idea that your content will be consumed at the same time as other content, whether you intended for it to be that way or not.
The tweet (sorry, “xweet”) below showcases an example of one such strategy: pairing a podcast clip with game footage. If you feel bored watching some dude’s face speaking into a microphone, you can look at the interesting, colorful video game instead. From the content creator’s point of view, this tactic increases the likelihood that the viewer will stay with the clip until the end, or at least longer than they otherwise would have.
I’ve even seen examples where the screen is split into four parts rather than two. The “main” content plays in one quadrant while the other three play either a Family Guy clip, smartphone gameplay, or something “oddly satisfying.”
You think that’s bad? Take a look at this synchronized reaction compilation video, which divides the screen into a mosaic of creators reacting to the footage in the center of the screen.
This type of approach allows the viewer to gauge the general tone of the reaction – happy, surprised, shocked, confused, disappointed, etc. – by overlooking the sea of faces. Each face represents a different video – a different piece of content – but the inherent goonability of those videos allows for them all to be combined together into one especially stimulating video. This is the content consumption equivalent of reaching your entire hand into a bag of M&Ms and gulping down many pieces at once.
Our target user is now Homer Simpson, gooning both his daughter’s onstage performance and the device in his hand.
Design for Goonability
How can one increase, for better or worse, the so-called “goonability” of their content? I have some ideas:
- Configure videos to autoplay or articles to infinitely scroll. The point is that you don’t want your user to have to expend any extra brainpower deciding what to consume next.
- Stimulate one fraction of a sense in particular – if targeting hearing, for example, focus on only language or music so that the user can easily listen to your content while listening to something else at the same time.
- Include captions for video content. This means that you can consume it silently. You can increase the stimulation by limiting the captions to only one or two words onscreen at any given time, so that they change constantly. Don’t rely on automatic captions because those might go sentence by sentence and that’s boring.
- Include many links or references that offer enticing distractions and lead users to open up additional tabs or windows.
- Content that other creators can easily “react” to is inherently goonable.
Here are my ideas for decreasing the goonability of content:
- Reduce movement on the screen. Keep things still. Force the viewer to focus their attention on one point.
- Lower the visual noise. Force the reader to use their imagination.
- Include characters, plots, and other elements that require storing things in working memory.
- Content that ends quickly or does not autoplay is not goonable.
While it feels like we’re hurtling into a nightmare world where attention spans are no longer… like, a thing… it’s not all bad. I think that upping the goonability of content can have the effect of making it more accessible and skimmable, for starters. But with the way things are trending, it seems that moving forward, designers will need to balance an expectation from users for unprecedented levels of stimulation with ethical designs that do not purposefully hijack or abuse our susceptibility for overstimulation.
Josh Anderson 