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Reading Flash Fiction is the Perfect Remedy for Our Shortened Attention Spans
It’s the ideal solution for our distracted age
A few years ago, there was a widely reported (and since debunked) survey by Microsoft Canada that claimed our attention spans have dropped to eight seconds, or one second less than a goldfish. I would link to the original survey, but now the link simply takes you to a Microsoft advertising page. A more accepted, and slightly more encouraging, standard for an adult’s attention span is around 20 minutes; that’s roughly the length of a TV sitcom minus commercials. Regardless, there is no question that our attention spans have decreased at the same time the amount of information we receive daily has skyrocketed.
I offer that bit of trivia for a reason. It seems to me that as we have moved into a world where many communicate solely through 280-character tweets and possess the focus of a dachshund with ADHD, a specific literary form should be on the rise: flash fiction. Flash fiction is a category of fiction defined mainly by word count that requires the usual plot and character development of a short story or novel in a significantly shorter space, thus the “flash” designation. As a general rule, a novel is any work of fiction over 50,000 words, a novella is a story between 10,000 and 40,000 words, a short story is…
