Linking Social Media Use to Shorter Attention Spans: A Student Survey with Machine Learning Analysis

Social media has become deeply integrated into our daily routines. The habitual use of social media has reduced our ability to pay attention for long periods. Many students including myself find it hard to concentrate in a one-hour class without reaching for their phones to check social media. Many of them can’t resist checking their phones when they hear a notification sound. To understand this, I surveyed 127 undergraduate students (ages 20–24) regarding daily social-media usage, notification load, app-switching frequency, and self-reported sustained-attention duration. After that, I used a simple machine learning model to check if there is a pattern. I predicted whether students could focus for less than 30 minutes (73.6%) or more, with 85% accuracy. These findings align with prior research (Twenge et al., 2019), which suggests that frequent notifications and multitasking behaviours disrupt student’s ability to concentrate. The results underscore the importance of adopting better digital habits and managing notifications to maintain sustained attention in academic settings.