‘Forget smartphones, it’s us cranky button-fanciers that have the short attention spans’

Someone asked me last week to explain why I don’t own a smartphone. Flustered, I gave her my standard, weak excuse that I don’t have any need for one, to which she replied with infuriating logic and accuracy, that I was carrying my laptop around with me.

It got me thinking about the real reasons why I don’t want to step into the modern age and the conclusion I’ve come to is this: I simply can’t be bothered. We’re always being told about millennials’ 12-second attention spans, but considering the widespread use of smartphones, that just can’t be right. In my experience, they’re vastly overcomplicated things that take far too much time to learn how to use. I like buttons. You know where you are with a button– on, off, up down- easy and quick. It doesn’t take an hour sitting down with a user’s manual. If a piece of tech takes me more than five seconds to figure out, I’m gone.

Needless complexity

Same goes for cars. I was in a new car lately and I decided, for a laugh, to repeatedly jab my finger at the infotainment touchscreen. What followed was a series of loud and terrifying “bongs” which took me a good five minutes of fiddling around in menus to turn off. Who needs that distraction whilst driving? It’s why I love my own car, a late-1980s antique with big buttons that click and make stuff happen (or sometimes don’t).

With all this needless complexity and the time people are willing to put into figuring out new tech, how can it be said that millennials have short attention spans? If that were true, the relaunched Nokia 3310 would have been wildly popular instead of a poorly-selling oddity. It’s us cranky button-fanciers that have the short attention spans.