In addition to what I’ve been calling nanoattention, there’s another problem with our current state of social media has gotten us: let’s call it the squirrel.

When you look again at that list I wrote the other day, which was just ten items long, it’s striking to realize that that’s ten different things, by ten different sources. With typical perusal, that might take 20-30 seconds to scroll through. I’m a light user by social media standards, so if we err on the side of 30 seconds, and say I spend 10 minutes on the site, that’s 200 different snippets of text, advertisements, photos, and maybe videos (if I watch said videos, that would of course slow the rate of consumption).

The sheer volume of information is hard enough to fathom, but then when you try to sustain your own attention to something after being intentionally distracted every few seconds, it’s a wonder it takes so long to regain focus.

It’s becoming more apparent that social media is a perpetual jump cut through life.