Digital Content and attention spans

I met a friend who had recently finished teaching a course at one of the premier B Schools in the country. He was lamenting that students would come to class unprepared; not having read the cases.

I have been teaching at B Schools for over a decade now and this is not a new phenomenon. An inverse relationship between the length of the assigned reading material and the number of students who come to class having actually read the material is not surprising. For the past few years, I have therefore relied primarily on what Harvard Business School classifies as brief cases, about 4 or 5 pages long.

What was surprising about my friend's experience was that he had assigned cases that were really short; only a page or two.

I wonder if Twitter has something to do with shortening attention spans.