The Incredible Shrinking Attention Span?

Lindsay Christians recently wrote about Strollers Theatre's production of the epic The Norman Conquests which consists of three full-length plays. She quotes Steve Scott of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago about lengthier entertainment.

Most of our daily information comes in “easily digestible small chunks,” said Steve Scott, an associate producer at the Goodman. “We long for an immersion experience that we don’t get on a day-to-day basis. Forty, 50, 60 years ago, films like ‘Gone with the Wind’ were fairly common.

Gone With the Wind runs nearly four hours. Were 4-hour films really "fairly common" 40-60 years ago?

I found this article up at Slashfilm which looks at average running times through the years and it includes this graph.



In the 1930s Gone With the Wind was positively epic with the average running time being around 95 minutes. It wasn't until the 1960s that the 2-hour mark was breached. The thing is, the average in the last decade was as high as it ever has been. Now look at the other graph at that page. It lists the running times of the top 14 grossing live action films of all time which are all from the past 20 years.





The average running time is 2 hours and 39 minutes. Titanic and LotR: The Return of the King exceed 3 hours.

One premise of Christians' article is that we have short attention spans and take in most of our information in bite-sized chunks. Yet the average running time of films these days is as high as ever. Gone With the Wind was shown with an intermission. And back in 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was considerably shorter with a running time of 2 hours and 15 minutes, was also shown with an intermission. And there's never been a time when Wagner's Ring cycle was considered anything but massively epic.

Going back and over to radio and TV, those forms of entertainment have usually come in manageable pieces. The shows themselves generally didn't have a very long running time and commercials broke the story up into bite-sized chunks. Any old-time radio and TV experts out there? Were episodes of The Shadow 3 hours long or 1? Was there ever an epic episode of The Andy Griffith Show?

I guess I'm not sure how different people's attention spans are today as opposed to 40-60 years ago. It may very well be shorter but I don't think that movie running times offer any proof to that effect. Films are longer these days than at pretty much anytime in the past. If people's attention spans have shrunk considerably I'd expect films to be shorter today than they were in a past when people were more willing to grapple with lengthier movies but they aren't.