Everyone knows it's hard to get college students to do the reading — remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can't even get film students — film students — to sit through movies. "I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever," Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. "But students will not do it."
I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University's Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.
Many students are resisting the idea of in-person screenings altogether. Given the ease of streaming assignments from their dorm rooms, they see gathering in a campus theater as an imposition. Professors whose syllabi require in-person screenings outside of class time might see their enrollment drop, Meredith Ward, director of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Accordingly, many professors now allow students to stream movies on their own time.
You can imagine how that turns out. At the University of Indiana, where Erpelding worked until 2024, professors could track whether students watched films on the campus's internal streaming platform. Fewer than 50 percent would even start the movies, he recalled, and only about 20 percent made it to the end. Even when students stream the entire film, it's not clear how closely they watch it. Some are surely folding laundry or scrolling Instagram, or both, while the movie plays.
The students I spoke with admitted to their own inattentiveness. They even felt bad about it. But that wasn't enough to make them sit through the assigned movies. Mridula Natarajan, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, took a world-cinema class this past fall. "There were some movies that were extremely slow-paced, and ironically, that was the point of the movie," she told me. "But I guess impatience made me skip through stuff or watch it on two-times speed."
The professors I spoke with didn't blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone.
Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people's attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004.
Erpelding, at UW Madison, said he tries to find a movie that everyone in his class has seen, to serve as a shared reference point they can talk about. Lately, that's become impossible. Even students who are interested in going into filmmaking don't necessarily love watching films. "The disconnect is that 10 years ago, people who wanted to go study film and media creation were cinephiles themselves," Erpelding told me. "Nowadays, they're people that consume the same thing everyone else consumes, which is social media."
Of course, young people haven't given up on movies altogether. But the feature films that they do watch now tend to be engineered to cater to their attentional deficit. In a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Matt Damon, the star of many movies that college students may never have seen, said that Netflix has started encouraging filmmakers to put action sequences in the first five minutes of a film to get viewers hooked.
Some professors are treating wilting attention spans as a problem to be solved, not a reality to accept. Stine, at Johns Hopkins, is piloting a course on "slow cinema" — minimalist films with almost no narrative thrust — with the goal of helping students redevelop long modes of attention.
But other professors, perhaps concluding that resistance is futile, are adjusting to the media their students grew up on. Some show shorter films or have students watch movies over multiple sittings. Erpelding, who primarily teaches filmmaking courses, has moved from teaching traditional production methods to explaining how to maximize audience engagement. He now asks students to make three- or four-minute films, similar to the social-media edits they see online. After all, that seems to be the only type of video many young people want to watch.