TPN Blogs

Last week I got an email publicizing a launch party for 303Grand, a Brooklyn-based retail store. While normally I would delete an advertisement concerning a storefront 3,000 miles away, something caught my eye. This wasn’t just your average boutique; this was a revolving storefront that housed every medium from visual and performance art to workshops and clothing. Each medium is given 3 days within the venue before the next scheduled storefront change. As somebody who always loves to try new things, I was truly blown away by the creativity, innovation and personality of this boutique. Not only does it regularly provide consumers with a new medium and entertainment, but it manages to reach across all demographics and audiences depending who is using the venue. Genius!

And then it dawned on me, could this storefront be entirely indicative of our current time and the coming generations? We are a generation of multi-taskers with a severely limited attention span. Thanks to resources that feed the “attention deficit appetite” like Twitter – which allows users to micro-blog, news tickers, and YouTube, we have evolved to become a group of people with a 2-second attention span. This “condition” is eloquently described by columnist Michael Silence as the Internet Attention Span. So, could it be that this Internet Attention Span is flooding into other aspects of our life so much that now storefronts will succeed by providing a constant change?