Digital Learning

The Impact Of Digital Overexposure?

A study by the eLearning Innovation Center (eLinC) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), in partnership with Accenture, has provided an overview of the main trends in how young people consume digital content.
(Infographic - Digital consumption trends. Author: UOC)
  • A UOC study of digital consumption between the ages of 14 and 35 also highlights a decline in attention spans
  • Socio-cultural environments determine consumption models and have an impact on how knowledge is absorbed
  • The study, carried out in partnership with Accenture, will help adapt the creation of educational content to new consumption habits

The results show that the mobile phone is the primary tool for reading digital content for 70% of people aged between 14 and 35. The report also points out that digital formats make this group more prone to distraction than paper, which is more conducive to concentration. The future of digital content consumption, which is available in open access format in the UOC repository, points out that, in a context of information overload, the only organizations that will thrive will be those that are able to capture users' attention.

This is not surprising: according to the data included in the study, humans' attention span has fallen from 12 to 8.2 seconds in 15 years.

Likewise, tools such as mobile phones, which we consult more than 150 times a day, place our ability to concentrate under further stress. "It's quite obvious that multitasking reduces our efficiency. However, at the same time we're also seeing that young people exercise considerable judgement when making a distinction between how to use different devices, formats and channels, depending on what they're doing or what they're trying to achieve," explained Guillem Garcia Brustenga, an expert in trend spotting and analysis at the eLinC, and the coordinator of the study.

Over 100 indicators

In the first phase of the study, the researchers analysed 111 reference indicators for digital content in order to identify the factors which have an impact on consumption, understand macro trends, extract data about young people's behaviour and understand the market logic behind educational content.

They found that the students who had the greatest difficulties in concentrating prefer content in video format for discovering or clarifying concepts. Digital content now plays a central role in young people's lives, in a context in which there is a clear trend towards monetization and virtualization: a third of them want to be influencers, and one in five think they could become a professional gamer.

Impact on health

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