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Gloria Mark is a professor in UCI's Department of Informatics. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. Prior to joining UCI, she was a research scientist at the GMD (German National Research Center for Information Technology), in Bonn, Germany; a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company; and a research scientist at the Electronic Data Systems Center for Advanced Research. Mark's research focuses on the design and evaluation of collaborative systems. Her current projects include studying multi-tasking of information workers, technology use in disrupted environments and the use of virtual worlds for work collaboration. In 2006, she received a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Mark has published in numerous conferences and journals, including the ACM CSCW, CHI, ECSCW, DIS, Group, and RE conferences and CSCW, CACM, and ISR journals. She was program chair for the ACM CSCW'06, ACM Group'05, and CSCW'12 conferences, and is on the editorial board of the CSCW journal.

Speaking of Psychology: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD

Episode 225.

These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Research has shown that over the past couple of decades people’s attention spans have shrunk in measurable ways. Gloria Mark, PhD, of the University of California Irvine, talks about how the internet and digital devices have affected our ability to focus, why multitasking is so stressful, and how understanding the science of attention can help us to regain our focus when we need it.

About the expert: Gloria Mark, PhD

Kim Mills : When was the last time that you had an entire day completely free from digital distractions? No text messages, no email notifications, no social media and no aimless internet browsing. It might be hard to think of the last time you even had a tech free hour. These days, most of us live our lives tethered to our computers and our smartphones, which are unending sources of distraction. Sometimes it can feel impossible to concentrate deeply on anything for any significant length of time.

And indeed researchers have found evidence that over the past couple of decades, people's attention spans have shrunk considerably. So how has the rise of the internet and digital devices affected our ability to focus and pay attention? What does it mean to pay attention to something anyway? When you're being bombarded by different tasks, notifications, and emails, is it possible to multitask and deal with them all effectively? Or is productive multitasking a myth? How can understanding the science of attention help us to regain our focus when we need it to improve both our productivity and our happiness?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology , the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Gloria Mark, a psychologist and the chancellor's professor of informatics at the University of California Irvine. Dr. Mark studies how people interact with technology in their everyday lives and how technology affects our attention, multitasking, mood, and stress level. She studies people's behavior in real world settings and she's found that our attention spans have been shrinking over the past two decades. Her new book, published in January, is called Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity . 

Dr. Mark, thank you for joining me today.

Gloria Mark, PhD : Thank you so much for having me.

Mills : Most of us probably think that we know what it means when we say we pay attention to something, but you wrote in your book that there are different kinds of attention. Can you talk about that? What are the different kinds of attentions that we experience in our everyday life?

Mark : Let me actually start out by talking about what William James, the father of psychology, says about attention. So back in the 19th century, he said “Everyone knows what attention is. It's the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” Of course, everyone knows what attention is. We all believe we know what attention is, but it's a lot more complicated than that.

So when I was studying attention, it occurred to me that you can be very engaged in something and you can put in a lot of mental effort. If I'm reading an article, it be challenging for me. On the other hand, there's a lot of things we do that are not at all challenging, but we're very engaged in. So when we're playing solitaire or playing simple games online, or if a person is gardening, they might be very engaged and not at all challenged. So we set out to study different kinds of attention when people use their devices. And what we did was we probed people throughout the day and we asked them at this point in time, want you to respond very quickly and tell us how engaged were you in what you just did, and how challenged were you in what you just did?

We find that when people are engaged and challenged, there seems to be rhythms in the day when this happens. And people seem to have peaks of times when they do this. We call this focused attention, tends to be late morning and again mid to late afternoon, about two to three. And when people are very engaged in something and not at all challenged, we call that rote activity.

Lots of things that people do are rote activity when they're online. It could be simple games, it could be even reading the news or doing social media. They tend to do that relatively uniformly throughout the day. But we do find that focused attention occurs in rhythms and it seems to correspond to the ebb and flow of our mental resources that we have available.

Mills : Well, I mentioned in the introduction that you have found evidence that our attention spans have shrunk in recent years, at least as measured by how long people spend on tasks and screens at work. Can you talk about that? How much have our attention spans shrunk?

Mark : So we started measuring this back in 2004, and at the time the measures that we used were stopwatches because that was the most precise thing we had at the time. We would shadow people with stopwatches for every single activity they did. We would record the start time and the stop time. So you're on a screen where you're working in a Word doc, as soon as you get to that screen, we clicked start time, soon as they turned away and checked email, we clicked stop time for the Word document, start time for the email. But fortunately, sophisticated computer logging methods were developed, and so of course we switched to those. So back in 2004, we found the average attention span on any screen to be two and a half minutes on average. Throughout the years it became shorter. So around 2012 we found it to be 75 seconds.

This is with logging techniques. This is an average. And then in the last five, six years, we found it to average about 47 seconds, and others have replicated this result within a few seconds. So it seems to be quite robust. Now, another way to think about this result is the median. The median means the midpoint of observations. The median is 40 seconds. And what this means is that half of all the measurements that we found were 40 seconds or less of people's attention spans. Now obviously because we're talking about averages and medians, sometimes people do spend longer, but quite a good bit of the time, their attention spans are much shorter and with an average coming to 47 seconds.

Mills : So why is this a problem? Since it seems to be happening almost universally at this point, is this just the new normal?

Mark : It seems to be the new normal because we seem to have reached a steady state over the last five or six years where these are the measures that we're seeing. Is this a good thing? I would argue it's not a good thing for the following reasons. First of all, we find in our research a correlation between frequency of attention switching and stress. So the faster the attention switching occurs, stress is measured by people wearing heart rate monitors. We show that stress goes up. We know from decades of research in the laboratory that when people multitask, they experience stress, blood pressure rises. There's a physiological marker in the body that indicates people are stressed. And in our studies, we've also simply asked people with well valid instruments to report their stress, their perceived stress, and it's reported to be higher the faster that we measure attention shifting.

So all of these measures seem to be consistent. I'll also measure that when people shift their attention so fast, and this is multitasking, when you keep switching your attention among different activities, people make more errors. And that's been shown in studies in the real world with physicians, nurses, pilots. We also know that performance slows. Why? Because there's something called a switch cost. So every time you switch your attention, you have to reorient to that new activity, that new thing you're paying attention to, and it takes a little bit of time.

So imagine if you're writing, let's say, say you're writing a chapter and you suddenly stop what you're doing and you switch and do something else, and then you come back to it, it's going to take you some time to reconstruct, what was I writing? What was the topic I was thinking about? What were the words I was using? That takes a bit of time. And so we incur these switch costs throughout the day as we're switching our attention, and this creates more effort. It uses more of our very precious mental resources on top of the work that we actually need to do.

Mills : You've also found that some switching is good. It's normal during the course of a day so that you might really concentrate on something for a length of time, and then you take a break and maybe you go online or maybe if you're working from home, you put in a load of laundry or you take a walk. Isn't that something that we actually need to do?

Mark : Absolutely. It's so important that we take breaks because if you work until you get exhausted, then of course you can get burnout. It's so important to take breaks and replenish. And by taking breaks, we have more energy, we have more attentional capacity, and we can actually do more. We can be more productive. The problem is that in our current world, many work environments, people neglect to take meaningful breaks, and we get ourselves into position where our performance suffers as a result.

Now, if you're going to take a break, it's really important to take a break at a point in the task that's called a break point. And a break point is a natural stopping point in a task. So going back to the writing example, if I'm writing something, a breakpoint would be at the end of a section or even at the end of a paragraph, but at a point where when I come back to it, then there's not going to be a lot of effort for me to have to reconstruct what I was doing. I've already finished that part. If you interrupt yourself in the middle of doing something as opposed to a natural stopping point, you use up a lot more mental resources and it's also more stressful.

Mills : Well, for people who want to schedule breaks, who really want to intentionally make the changes that you're talking about, what do you think about programs such as internet blockers that prevent people from going online during certain hours of the day so that you can force yourself to be more focused? Do you think that those are effective?

Mark : We've done a study with internet blockers, and it turns out it very much depends on an individual's personality. So people who have poor self-regulation skills can benefit from these kinds of blockers. Essentially what you're doing is you're offloading the work of self-regulation onto the software, and the software becomes a proxy agent for you. It's doing the work. It turns out people who have good self-regulation skills, so people who score low in impulsivity as a trait, people who score high in conscientious these are people who are actually harmed by these blockers.

Why? Because these are people who are very good at taking breaks and coming right back to work. They can take a break, they can go to social media, they can go to a news site and they can take a break, relax themselves, then they can come back to work. In this study, we took away their opportunity to take a quick online break, and they got burnt out. They worked straight through. They didn't take breaks. On the whole, I prefer that people develop their own agency, their own self-efficacy in controlling their attention. These software blockers can be good at times, but I think it's far more important that people learn to develop their own skills to control their attention.

Mills : A lot has been written about the Pomodoro technique, which is basically you set a timer for every 25 minutes and then you agree you're going to work straight through for 25 minutes, a timer goes off and you get a five minute break. What about that as sort of a low tech blocker?

Mark : Well, that's fine, but there are individual differences and some people would be able to work longer than what the Pomodoro technique dictates. Some people would work less. I think it's much more important that people become self-aware of their own level of energy and the amount of attentional resources they have available and take breaks according to what their own levels are.

So I've learned to do this. I've learned to become more aware of what my own capacity is, and when I start feeling tired, that's the point when I take a break. If I know I've got a really hard task to do, I might schedule a break before I start doing that task so I can replenish myself and then right after so that I can build back up the resources that I expended. The worst thing you can do, the worst thing is to schedule back to back Zoom meetings without breaks that it just gets us exhausted. There's no transition between these meetings. So we need to schedule in transitions between these kinds of hard tasks.

Mills : And when we're talking about attention and attention spans, there's something a little bit different but related, which is the concept of flow. Can you explain what that is? Because that is a kind of attention and it's very, very different from what we've just been talking about.

Mark : That's right. So flow is a type of attention that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered, and it's what he calls the optimal state of attention. It's when people are so immersed in something that time just doesn't seem to matter. And so it's when we are at our peak creativity, we're using the optimal amount of challenge of our skills. So if we're not challenged enough in whatever your skill happens to be, you won't go into flow. If you're challenged too much in your skill, you won't go into flow. It'll be too hard. So there's that sweet spot that you have to hit to go into flow. So before I went into psychology, I actually had studied fine arts and used to be an artist, and I would get into flow regularly, and it's the nature of the work of being an artist and being creative that I could regularly get into flow.

Now, as a scientist, I rarely get into flow because of the nature of my work where I have to be very analytical and I have to use very careful thought. Is that a bad thing? No, not at all. It's very rewarding. It's just I realize that the nature of my work and the nature of a lot of knowledge work is such that it may not be conducive to flow, but sometimes I get into flow. If I'm in say a brainstorming session with other people, we might get into a kind of group flow where everyone is feeding off of each other's ideas. But in my typical day-to-day life, now, I generally don't get into flow, and it's not a bad thing.

Mills : Let's talk for a minute about the effect of the internet and devices on children's attention span. Most of your research has been with adults, but kids are spending a lot of time on devices as well. Are they going to have even more trouble with attention than those of us who first experience this level of distraction as adults?

Mark : This is something that I think we should be very concerned about as a society. So it turns out children that are as young as two to four years old, they already average two and a half hours of screen time a day. And when they get to be between five and eight, they average about three hours of screen time a day. Now, most of that screen time, it's TV and YouTube viewing, but children also do a lot of gaming. So we know from a lot of laboratory studies that when children are very young, they're a lot more susceptible to distraction than older children. And when they're distracted, it takes them longer to get back and focus again on that thing that they were distracted from. So I worry that when young children are spending so much time on the screen, it acculturates them to think that this is normal behavior to be on a screen.

The problem is that when children are very young, there are certain parts of their brain that are not yet mature. So their ability to self-control and a part of the brain called executive function and executive function, you can think of it as the governor of the mind. So it manages things like decision-making, and setting priorities of what we should be paying attention to. It helps manage interference of peripheral stimuli in the environment, and executive function is not yet well developed and children are sitting in front of screens and they're exposed to all kinds of potential distractions.

So I think this is not a good idea. Children need self-control for learning, and more and more we're seeing schools having a lot of online learning available for kids, and kids need self-control as a skill to be able to search for information, to do math problems online, to read and write without being distracted. I find it problematic that we're putting children into a digital world before some very critical mental functions are fully developed. I don't think kids are really ready for that.

Mills : Can focus be taught? I mean, you seem to be implying that we need to be doing something particularly with children so that they aren't constantly distracted. But how do you teach somebody to focus on something?

Mark : Well, for children, I think the best thing children can do is to do activity off-screen. And I think they would learn to focus, whether it's playing outside, reading books is an excellent way to get children to focus. If we're talking about adults, I think that one of the best things that adults can do is to make sure that your internal tank of mental resources is kept at high capacity. So when you have a full tank of resources, you can focus much better than when you're just spent, when your resources have just drained because you're doing hard work all day, you're switching your attention a lot. It's going to be very, very hard to focus, and there are things we can do to build up those resources. So one of the best things you can do is to get a really good night's sleep. Everyone says, of course we know you should get a good night's sleep, but let me tell you what happens when you don't. When people accumulate what's called sleep debt and sleep debt is the accumulation of loss of sleep.

If you need eight hours of sleep a night—and I need eight hours of sleep a night—but if you're only getting six hours a night, that difference is called a sleep debt. And if you're consistently getting six hours of sleep a night, you're accumulating sleep debt. And we know that the greater the sleep debt, the shorter the attention spans. And what do people do when they have a lot of sleep debt? We found that they tend to do more lightweight activities like social media. They just don't have the resources to be able to focus and do hard work, so they do what's easy based on the amount of resources that they have available.

Mills : Let's switch topics for a minute to something else that you talk about in your book, which is how TV and movies have changed in the past few decades. You're right that the pace of television and movies has sped up and things like the length of each camera shot, they're getting shorter. Why is that? And are those changes affecting our attention or is this happening because the people who are creating these things already know that we have no attention anymore?

Mark : So I was very surprised to learn that TV and film shot lengths have decreased over the years. They started out much longer. They now average about four seconds a shot length. That's on average. If you watch MTV music videos, they're much shorter. They're only a couple of seconds. So we've become accustomed to seeing very fast shot lengths when we look at TV and film. Even commercials have shortened in length. Commercials used to be much longer. Now it's not uncommon to see six-second commercials, even shorter than that. Now it's a chicken and egg question. We don't know if TV and film have affected our attention spans on computers and phones. We don't know if our attention spans have affected the decision-making of film editors and directors. We don't know exactly if there is any causal connection we see these two parallel trends.

It could be the case that directors and editors are influenced by their own short attention spans when they create these film shots or it could be that they're creating short film shots because they think that's what the viewer wants to see. But this has become quite ubiquitous. In fact, on YouTube, there's a particular YouTube aesthetic which uses jump cuts. So when you're watching a YouTube film, the film becomes very jumpy. The natural pauses that people make when they speak it is removed. So the idea is to pack more content into a shorter amount of time. So we're seeing short lengths of content from all directions. It's not just what we're attending to on computers and phones.

Mills : But I think you found that some of this we're doing to ourselves. I know some people who feel like they're so time crunched that when they want to listen to a podcast, they turn up the speed to 1.5 or 2 and then listen to it. Why are we doing this to ourselves and is this helping?

Mark : I myself have sometimes done that?. Why do we do this? There's a number of reasons. I can't say exactly why we do it. It could be because we want to fit more content into a shorter amount of time because there's so much content available, right? We're talking about access to the world's largest candy store, and we want to sample all the wares that are available. So of course, you might want to speed up the podcast so that you can simply take more in and quickly get to your next favorite podcast. So I don't know exactly why we're doing it on ourselves. It could be also out of habit. We're just used to listening to things faster, but we do have all of this content available to us at our fingertips within milliseconds, and so perhaps we just want to sample as much as we possibly can.

Mills : Now, during the pandemic, many people have switched to remote work, which I'm guessing has meant more emails, more messages on Slack, and Teams, and workers have to deal with all of this. How do you think this is affecting people's attention and focus? Do you even know? Is it too soon to say?

Mark : Yeah, so I've worked on a survey with colleagues. So we have people’s self-reports, they've reported that it's hard to focus. I've done other work where we're looking at team interaction in remote work and have picked up some information from that. People do report having a hard time focusing. It's a different kind of distraction than you would have in a workplace. Of course, you're distracted by the pile of dirty laundry that you're looking at. In a workplace, you might be distracted by ambient noise in the workplace. We do know that it makes a difference whether people have a private workspace at home where it can be quiet or whether they have to share a public working space with others, which is more distracting. Some people might go to a cafe to work, and of course, that creates another type of distraction. So a lot of it very much depends on the environment, where the person is working.

We also know that if you're remote from your colleagues, you can't really signal to them when is a good time to interrupt. If you're in a workplace, and especially if you can see your colleagues, you can see when they just hung up the phone, then you know it might be a nice time to walk over and talk to them or you might stand outside their office and wait, and then you can see when it's good to interrupt. When we're remote, we don't have that visual information, and so we can just be sending electronic communications to our colleagues at all time. There's another study that I did with my postdoc, and she found that a lot of people feel that they want to go above and beyond what they ordinarily do to be able to signal to their colleagues, to their supervisors that they're working hard. And so they jump to answer their email, their Slack messages so that they can demonstrate, hey, I'm working—you don't see me, but I want you to know that I'm here and I'm working hard, and that's why I'm going to jump on these messages.

Mills : Now, we've been talking a lot about what individuals can do regarding better attention spans, but are there changes that organizations should be making or even changes at a societal level that could help all of us with boosting our ability to stay focused on important things?

Mark : There are, and I'm a big advocate for changes on a collective level. And the reason is that if any individual decides to just pull out and completely cut themselves off from technology, they might penalize themselves. If you're a knowledge worker of any kind, you're cutting yourself off from important work communications. You can be cutting yourself off from communications from family, friends, loved ones, from important news in the world. So it's not always beneficial for any individual to cut themselves off, but an organization can do things. They can, for example, control times during the day when electronic communications are sent. They can create a window of time when no communications would be sent, and this would be a quiet time when people can work. In our research, we find that people check email on average 77 times a day. And if you have this quiet time, at least you can curtail that checking.

We might be able to reduce the amount of checking because there's no point to check, there won't be email coming. On a societal level, there's starting to be what's called right to disconnect laws, and there's one in France, it's called the El Khomri law. There's also Ireland and Ontario have policies, so other countries are starting to pick up on this, and it's the idea that no worker can be penalized if they do not answer electronic communications before and after work hours. New York City tried to introduce a right to disconnect law in its city council meeting. That got shut down very quickly. And my favorite, I read the transcripts of the meeting, and my favorite response, my favorite argument against it was from the Bureau of Tourism, which said, we're the greatest tourist city in the world, we're the city that never sleeps.

So if we have right to disconnect laws, it enables people to detach from work, and that has so much psychological benefit for individuals. You truly do need a break from work. We can't be on work 24/7, and that's what's happening. The borders between our personal life and work life have just blurred so that in personal time when people are at home after work, they're dealing with work problems, and work communications. People do need time to really relax, to break away from work. It's such a great psychological benefit, and if they can do that, it enables them to better reattach to work the next day because they're fresh, they're replenished. So I'm a big advocate of right to disconnect policy.

Mills : let me ask you a totally different question, which is what's next for you? What are you working on now? What are the important research questions that you want to see answered?

Mark : Yeah, so I would like to continue looking at our attention. I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm interested in how we can get more value from the internet. We have this incredible resource available to us, and so rather than be upset by it because it distracts us, how can we turn that around and instead find value from it? And how can we utilize our time best and optimize our time best when we use the resources that the internet offers without getting exhausted from it?

And I also have been looking at teamwork, remote teamwork and how that can be optimized because more and more companies are starting to have hybrid work and remote work, and what are the repercussions from that? What are the benefits from that? So I'd like to understand that better.

Mills : Well, that all sounds really interesting. I look forward to seeing your subsequent research. Appreciate your joining me today, Dr. Mark. Thank you very much.

Mark : Thank you so much for having me.

Mills : You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected] . Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

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Episode 225: Why our attention spans are shrinking, with Gloria Mark, PhD

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• Gloria Mark, PhD
• Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity

Speaking of Psychology

Speaking of Psychology is an audio podcast series highlighting some of the latest, most important, and relevant psychological research being conducted today.

Produced by the American Psychological Association, these podcasts will help listeners apply the science of psychology to their everyday lives.

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Your host: Kim I. Mills

Kim I. Mills is senior director of strategic external communications and public affairs for the American Psychological Association, where she has worked since 2007. Mills led APA’s foray into social media and envisioned and launched APA’s award-winning podcast series Speaking of Psychology  in 2013. A former reporter and editor for The Associated Press, Mills has also written for publications including The Washington Post , Fast Company , American Journalism Review , Dallas Morning News , MSNBC.com and Harvard Business Review .

In her 30+-year career in communications, Mills has extensive media experience, including being interviewed by The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Wall Street Journal , and other top-tier print media. She has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America , Hannity and Colmes , CSPAN, and the BBC, to name a few of her broadcast engagements. Mills holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Barnard College and a master’s in journalism from New York University.

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Gloria Mark Ph.D.

Gloria Mark, Ph.D., is Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in psychology. She has been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012. She works in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI) and her primary research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people's lives. She studies digital media use in real world environments using sensors combined with other methods. She is also interested in the future of work, and how teams adapt to remote work environments. She has published over 200 articles in the field of human-computer interaction. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017, has been a Fulbright Scholar, and is a recipient of the NSF Career Grant. Her work has also been recognized outside of academia: She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival, and her work on our behavior with technology has appeared in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, and many others. Her new book Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity is published by HarperCollins: Hanover Square Press.

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Gloria Mark

Gloria Mark is Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. Her primary research interest is in understanding the impact of digital media on people’s lives and she is best known for her work in studying people’s multitasking, mood and behavior while using digital media in real world environments.

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Uw researchers develop data visualization tool to advance child welfare.

Leah Pistorius July 18, 2024

In response to the evolving needs of the child welfare system, UW researchers are advancing access to visualizations of foster care data. John Fowler (HCDE PhD '23) and Professor Mark Zachry developed VizCare, a new tool to increase the use of research in child welfare decision-making. 

In the child welfare system, data plays a critical role in informing decisions that impact the lives of children and families. Professionals in this field need access to clear, comprehensive data to make informed decisions and advocate for policy changes. However, interpreting vast amounts of data, including large government datasets and qualitative data from people with lived experience with the foster care system, can be challenging.

HCDE alumnus John Fowler (PhD '23), now a Research Scientist and Engineer in the UW School of Social Work, and HCDE Professor Mark Zachry have developed VizCare, a new visualization tool to support child welfare professionals in making evidence-based decisions and communicating with policymakers. 

VizCare was informed by a study with diverse professionals engaged in child welfare work across the United States. The researchers identified specific requirements essential for supporting their work, including the desire for humanized data that reflects the real experiences of individuals within the child welfare system and the need for a user-friendly interface that novices could use.

VizCare allows users to create custom visualizations using data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System. To meet the need of interacting with policymakers, users can interact with data related to three dimensions of the foster care system, including planning, funding, and outcomes. Within each section, custom charts can be created to explore disparities in the system based on geography and demographics, such as race and age. 

VizCare is an interactive visualization dashboard developed by John Fowler that allows for exploration of foster care data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). Users can customize their own visualizations to explore data related to three dimensions of the foster care system, including Planning, Funding , and Outcomes . Within each section, users can create charts that explore disparities in the system based on geography and demographics like race and age.

VizCare was developed using user-centered design techniques and Fowler and Zachry integrated feedback from potential users at each stage of the design process. After identifying the needs of child welfare professionals, the researchers deployed VizCare for the professionals to test in their work. Study participants found VizCare useful for people with or without data analysis expertise to quickly explore existing data and present it in an accessible way that can help influence research and policy advocacy.

This work builds upon Fowler's previous work developing FosterCommViz , a tool that visualizes data from online conversations by those with experiences in foster care. VizCare integrates FosterCommViz with a validated government dataset into a single web-based system.

Fowler and Zachry will present this work at the upcoming IEEE Professional Communication Society Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

VizCare represents a significant step forward in leveraging data to improve child welfare practices. By providing professionals with easy-to-use visualization tools, they can make more informed decisions and provide better outcomes for children in the welfare system.  

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The Australian Olympian 'Raygun' went viral for her breaking moves. Now she's defending them.

• Rachael Gunn, known as "Raygun," is an Australian B-girl (break-girl) who competed at the Olympics .
• She lost three battles in the round-robin part of the competition, but her moves went viral online.
• Gunn and sporting organizations are speaking out about harassment and misinformation after her performance.

Breaking made its debut at the 2024 Paris Olympics — and while she didn't earn a spot on the podium, the Australian breaker Rachael Gunn, known as Raygun, has received plenty of recognition online.

Gunn is a 36-year-old lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney whose research focuses on the "cultural politics of breaking," according to her faculty profile .

But Gunn's time on the Olympic stage was short-lived. The B-girl was eliminated during the round-robin stage of the women's breaking competition, losing in one-on-one battles to the United States' Logistx, France's Syssy, and Lithuania's Nicka.

Raygun didn't earn a point in any of those battles, but as clips of her performance spread online, she got something else: instant meme status.

Here's what you need to know about Raygun now that the breaking competition is over.

Raygun is an academic who studies breaking — and she competes internationally

Before Gunn went to the Olympics, she approached the 2024 Games from an academic perspective.

With her coauthor, Lucas Marie, Gunn published an article in the June 2023 issue of Global Hip Hop Studies titled "The Australian breaking scene and the Olympic Games: The possibilities and politics of sportification." The article examined how the Olympics' institutionalization would affect the Australian breaking scene.

Alongside her academic career, Gunn is a competing B-girl. But before she got into breaking, she had experience with ballroom dancing, jazz, hip-hop, salsa, and tap, The Australian Women's Weekly reported. Gunn told The Sydney Morning Herald that her husband, Samuel Free, introduced her to breaking in 2008 while they were at university. Free is still her coach, she said.

Gunn told Women's Weekly that breaking "hooked" her in 2012, around the time that she began her doctoral program in cultural studies. She began competing more seriously in 2018 and eventually set her sights on the Olympics.

According to her university profile, she was the top-ranked B-girl of the Australian Breaking Association in 2020 and 2021, representing the country at the World DanceSport Federation Breaking Championships in 2021, 2022, and 2023. She also won the WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships in 2023.

"My bag always has two main things: It's like, my knee pads and my laptop," Gunn said on the podcast " The Female Athlete Project ." "Because I need my knee-pads to break. And then, yeah, just do some emails quickly. Or like, do some revisions on a chapter I submitted, or copyedit this article I did, or moderate those grades."

The athlete also told the Herald that she preferred to wear "baggy jeans and a baggy T-shirt" while breaking.

"I like the heaviness they bring," Gunn said. "Maybe it's my background in hip-hop, but having weight closer to the ground works for me, gets me in the right headspace."

Raygun's performances at the Olympics sparked memes and criticism

Raygun took the stage at the Olympics wearing a tracksuit in Australia's green and gold, breaking out moves that included hopping like a kangaroo. Her performances attracted attention online and memes that compared her moves to, among other things, dancing children.

Related stories

The fact that RayGun has a Ph.D in breakdancing is its own commentary on academia vs real world expertise. https://t.co/pQcL8HzAW9 — BioTechSnack (@SnackBioTech) August 9, 2024

me forcing my mom to watch the dance i made up in the pool pic.twitter.com/zbtwEFjpTG — kenzi (@kenzianidiot) August 9, 2024

Judges made the right call here because what was that move lol #Olympics #Breakdancing pic.twitter.com/sXAs9AdHjX — MⓞNK BLOODY P👑s (@MonkeyBlood) August 9, 2024

But some critics argued that Raygun's performance didn't represent breaking — a sport that will not return to the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

Breaking came from Black and brown communities in the Bronx in the 1970s. Malik Dixon, an African American man who lives in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that Gunn came off as "somebody who was toying with the culture" during a significant moment for the sport.

(You can watch the 2024 Olympic events — including Raygun's full performance — on Peacock.)

Raygun qualified for the Olympics through the Oceania Breaking Championships

There were three ways to qualify for breaking at the Olympics, which the World Dance Sport Federation (WDSF) outlined in April 2022: at the WDSF championship in Belgium in September 2023, in a continental qualifier, or in an Olympic qualifier series held in 2024. Gunn qualified regionally by winning the WDSF Oceania Breaking Championships, which were held in Sydney in October 2023.

AUSBreaking organized the Oceania Breaking Championships, according to the WDSF .

AUSBreaking posted on Instagram about the Oceanic Olympic qualifying event on Instagram in September 2023, announcing in a September 25, 2023 post that competitor registration was open. The panel of judges was composed of 10 breakers from multiple countries, led by head judge Katsu One of Japan.

Per the Sydney Morning Herald, Gunn was the highest-scoring B-girl on day one of the championships. She won two battles on the second day to secure her title and a qualifying spot in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

AUSBreaking released a statement on Instagram Monday about the selection process, saying that the qualifying event was "open to all interested participants in the Oceanic region," conducted in line with WDSF standards, and adjudicated by an international panel that used the same judging system as the 2024 Olympics.

"Ultimately, Rachael Gunn and Jeff Dunne emerged as the top performers in exactly the same process, securing their spots to represent Australia in Paris," the statement reads. "Their selection was based solely on their performance in their battles on that day."

Raygun and sporting organizations have spoken out about misinformation after her performance

Claims have circulated online that Gunn unfairly obtained her spot in the games. Posts online, as reported by the Australian Associated Press , claimed that Gunn's husband was one of the judges in her qualifying event. One petition hosted on Change.org claimed that she established the governing body that ran the selection process. That petition was eventually removed after it was placed under review, per an archived snapshot .

A representative for Change.org confirmed to Business Insider on Thursday that the petition had been flagged for misinformation, reviewed per the platform's community guidelines, and removed from the platform.

"Change.org maintains strict guidelines against content that constitutes harassment, bullying, or spreading false information. We take such matters seriously and remove any content that violates these standards to protect our users and uphold the integrity of our community," the rep said in an email statement to BI.

Despite the online claims, Free was not one of the judges at Gunn's qualifying event. And Gunn did not establish AUSBreaking. The organization said in a statement that it was founded by its president Lowe Napalan in 2019, and "at no point" was Gunn "the founder, an executive, committee member, or in any position of leadership."

The Australian Olympic Commission (AOC) also released a statement condemning the Change.org petition, and demanding its removal. It also said that by winning the Oceania championship, Gunn was "legitimately nominated" by DanceSport Australia to the AOC to represent Australia at the Olympics.

"The petition has stirred up public hatred without any factual basis. It's appalling," AOC chief executive officer Matt Carroll said in the statement. "No athlete who has represented their country at the Olympic Games should be treated in this way and we are supporting Dr. Gunn and Anna Meares at this time."

In a video uploaded to her personal Instagram account, Gunn said that she was "honored" to have represented Australia and breaking during its Olympic debut. But the "hate" that followed was "devastating," she said. When it came to misinformation around her qualification, Gunn referred viewers to previously issued statements from the AOC and AUSBreaking.

Raygun and breaking judges have defended her Olympic performance

At a press conference on Saturday, the day after Gunn's competition, Anna Meares, the head of the Australian team, responded to criticism of Gunn online.

"I love Rachael, and I think that what has occurred on social media with trolls and keyboard warriors, and taking those comments and giving them airtime, has been really disappointing," Meares said, per ESPN .

"Raygun is an absolutely loved member of this Olympic team. She has represented the Olympic team, the Olympic spirit with great enthusiasm. And I absolutely love her courage," Meares continued. "I love her character, and I feel very disappointed for her, that she has come under the attack that she has."

During a press conference on Sunday, Martin Gilian, the Olympic breaking head judge, defended Gunn's performance, saying breaking was "all about originality" and representing your roots, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

"This is exactly what Raygun was doing," Gilian said. "She got inspired by her surroundings, which in this case, for example, was a kangaroo."

Gunn said during the Saturday press conference that "all of my moves are original," ESPN reported. She told The Guardian that her biggest strength was "creativity."

"I was never going to beat these girls on what they do best, the dynamic and the power moves, so I wanted to move differently, be artistic and creative," Gunn told The Guardian, "because how many chances do you get that in a lifetime to do that on an international stage. I was always the underdog and wanted to make my mark in a different way."

This story was originally published on August 12, 2024, and has been updated to include the latest information and statements from those involved.

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