In an article in The Guardian, Ben Muzzell writes about the changes that are coming to education and businesses in "the mass attention deficit era." A sign of this happening: many people cannot read a book or complete a task without switching gears and doing a quick search of their email or surfing the net. According to Nokia research, there are many in the Millennial Generation who check their phones 150 times a day.

And the next generation is even more addicted to screens, spending twice as much time looking at them as they spend in school. Two pieces of research by the Pew Internet Project suggest that kids need more time away from digital technologies. But it may be that a better strategy is to work with the different cognitive skills children have developed rather than fight them.

Muzzell sums up experiments going on in schools around the world with "microlearning – in which education is delivered in small, active, and frequent snippets rather than big, sit-down monologues." It is time for businesses to catch up with these adaptations to the behavior of generations whose brains work in different ways than older generations. Muzzell encourages businesses to adapt to the "distraction" tendencies of employees as the new natural order of things.

At Spirituality & Practice, we have already acknowledged the different ways people access information. We often incorporate short quotes and references to resources into our book and movie reviews. We'll occasionally do a review that consists of seemingly disconnected paragraphs approaching our subject from different directions. Our curated pages acknowledge that people like to jump around between types of information to get a better understanding of a subject. On S&P's new website, there will be more changes that signal our acknowledgement that we are living in the mass attention deficit era.

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