Because I have spent many years as a university professor, people sometimes ask me how students of today are different than those from previous generations. This is an easy question to answer: as a cohort, their attention spans are much shorter and the trend has been accelerating over the last decade…in conjunction with the explosion of affordable information and communications technologies.

Colleges and universities retain professionally educated staff whose job it is to assist students with learning disabilities like Dyslexia and also with test anxiety. These kinds of issues have been commonplace for years. Only in the last decade have I seen and heard of so many students diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). In layman’s terms, this is basically a problem of having trouble focusing or concentrating for long. In earlier times, educators and others called it a wandering mind. The pharmaceutical industry offers drugs for its treatment.

In my university career I have been a professor, an associate dean, a department head, and a committee member evaluating professors for promotion and retention. Consequently, I have read countless student teaching evaluations of instructors. Compared to a decade or two ago, the word “boring” or a close equivalent crops up much more frequently to describe a classroom experience. Many contemporary students expect to be entertained, which, of course, is not the same as learning. Ipso facto, by the nature of the coursework, professors teaching the most intellectually challenging material and majors are disadvantaged in this regard, as compared to someone conveying less rigorous subjects.

(The “boredom factor” has evidently carried over to the workplace. The Conference Board has been doing surveys of Americans’ job satisfaction for 22 years. The most recent survey results were reported in January 2010 and revealed the lowest level of satisfaction ever, 45 percent. The recession no doubt is a major cause but one of the leading specific reasons was that more workers find their jobs to be  uninteresting.)

No doubt students’ generally shortened attention spans and expectations for classroom entertainment have been caused to a large degree by technologies that are available to them that were not around for their parents and grandparents. Mass access to cell phones, computers, email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook and the like have created a frenetic pace of life and instantaneous feedback.

Often, digital communications technologies are a negative for cultivating strong interpersonal skills. An AT&T survey of 1,000 people between the ages of 18 and 35 found that three out of four flirt by text messaging. I have read or heard of people at their workplace using text messaging to contact someone in the next office or carrel, rather than walking a short distance to talk face-to-face. I have witnessed people text messaging at an orchestra performance.

Moreover, if people talking on cell phones while driving cars is a hazard, text messaging has to be much worse. In fact, messaging has been the culprit in numerous auto accidents and the deadliest train crash in the United States in 15 years.

Little wonder that the arts are having a difficult time these days drawing a younger audience, who are accustomed to entertainment that is faster paced. Symphony orchestras, ballets, operas, and art museums are fighting an uphill battle to attract young men and women.

Even the most cerebral of cerebrals, Sherlock Holmes, has been brought into the digital age. The recent Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson is more about high-tech visual effects than it is about how a cool and calculating detective scientifically analyzes the clues and follows the trail of his quarry. Holmes purists would not recognize the macho Holmes and the non-bungling Watson. The pyrotechnics and action-filled narrative worked, as the movie was a hit at the box office.

All of this also has serious implications for the old-time sport of horse racing. If racing is to make inroads with the younger generation, it will have to continue to adapt the sport to the contemporary lifestyle, as with remote wagering. On the one hand, a certain segment of the young will be attracted to horse racing by the intellectual challenge of handicapping, just as people in generations before have been intrigued by the intricacies of figuring out who is going to win. But that won’t deliver enough fans to keep horse racing at a critical mass into the future. To survive, tracks will have to develop pari-mutuel products that do not require a detailed knowledge of handicapping and not much of a time commitment. Racetrack offerings will have to extend beyond the core pari-mutuel product. In short, the whole experience will have to be more compelling.

The communications and information technologies that the young take for granted are a potentially huge positive for pari-mutuel purveyors. Betting has never been easier and, in addition, social networking can be employed to generate interest in the sport of horse racing.

Whether horse racing is around as a significant sport/business 20 years hence depends on how adept racing executives prove to be in crafting an attractive value proposition for people who have a plethora of entertainment options to choose from and a lower threshold for boredom than generations past.

I recognize that my concerns could be wrong…that the youth of today will change as they age and begin to act like middle-aged and senior adults of today and the past. But I wouldn’t bet racing’s future on that happening.

Copyright © 2010 Horse Racing Business