WELCOME to this column. Not all of you will make it to the end.

That’s because, according to conventional wisdom, people aren’t concentrating on anything for very long any more.

So if you can last through the following 600 words or so, get ready to claim your prize.

We’ve all heard the claims that attention spans are getting shorter – and that many people, distracted by their smartphones and social media, are never fully focused on anything.

But that may not be true.

I spent Thursday at the first You Are the Media Conference, an event at Boscombe’s fantastic Shelley Theatre, organised by Poole-based marketer and podcaster Mark Masters.

The conference brought together a lot of impressive people to discuss how you can get noticed online and build a keen following for whatever you do.

Jason Miller, a very clever, hugely energetic American in charge of social media at the networking site LinkedIn, was the first speaker. And he called into question the commonly held idea that people now have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

Before we get into that, let’s consider whether there is any truth in the idea that goldfish have such short attention spans.

How do we know this ‘fact’ anyway? Is it because fish fidget if you tell them a long story?

The idea chimes with the other popular notion that goldfish have short memories. Again, how do we know? It’s true that you rarely get a birthday card from one, but they seem to recognise the jar of food when it comes into view in the sky above their fishy world.

It turns out that quite a lot of studies have been done into the cognitive abilities of fish, and the research seems to have established that they have more capacity for memory than people think.

So much for the brainpower of fish, but what about humans and their ability to concentrate? Have we reached the point where goldfish will think we’re the skittish species?

Jason Miller looked at the reports, published in some apparently reputable outlets, that human attention spans were down to eight seconds. It turns out that the research in question did not say this at all.

“Marketers have been told that everything we do moving forward has to fit into this non-existent eight-second attention span,” he said.

And he went on to say something really encouraging, backed up by statistics.

LinkedIn has found that “long-form” content online – deifned as blog posts of 2,000-3,000 words – was actually more likely to be shared by readers than shorter content.

It was discovered that posting less often, but making the pieces longer and better, was the way to go.

So the idea that people only want to see videos and bite-sized information seems to be wrong.

The process of discovering stuff to read may take the form of short bursts of attention, but once people find something worthwhile, they focus and stick with it.

This is all encouraging for anyone who believes in the power of the written word. Which, presumably, includes you, because you’re here reading this.

In the offline world, too, I think there is plenty of evidence that people want to focus for longer on an experience.

Books have grown in average length. According to one study of best-sellers, the average number of pages in a novel rose by 25 per cent in the past 15 years. And it will continue to rise until someone tells Stephen King to go back and cut a bit out.

Meanwhile, people are enjoying other interests that involve concentration and focus, from adult colouring books to needlework and crafting.

It’s true that many people lead stressed and overcrowded lives, with too many stimuli coming at them. And the pressures of the online world and social media can be part of that problem.

But we have a bit more mental staying power than some would have us believe.

Much like our friends the goldfish.