| The trouble with television is that it
discourages concentration. Television's variety becomes a narcotic, not a
stimulus. Its serial, kaleidoscopic exposures force us to follow its lead．The
viewer is on a perpetual guided tour: 30 minutes at the museum, 30 at the
cathedral, 30 for a drink, then back on the bus to the next attraction—except on
the television, typically, the spans allotted are on the order of minutes or
seconds, and the chosen delights are more often car crashes and people killing
one another. In short, a lot of television usurps one of the most precious
gifts, the ability to focus your attention yourself, rather than just passively
surrender it. Capturing your attention—and holding it—is the prime motive of most television programming and enhances its role as a profitable advertising vehicle. Programmers live in constant fear of losing anyone's attention. The surest way to avoid doing so is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action and movement. Quite simply, television operates on the appeal to the short attention span. In the case of news, this practice, in my view, results in inefficient communication. I question how much of television's nightly news effort is really absorbable and understandable. Much of it is what has been aptly described as "machine-gunning with scraps." I think the technique fights coherence. I think it tends to make things ultimately boring and dismissible (unless they are accompanied by horrifying pictures) because almost anything is boring and dismissible if you know almost nothing about it. I believe that TV's appeal to the short attention span is not only inefficient communication but decivilizing as well. Consider the casual assumptions that television tends to cultivate: that complexity must be avoided, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, that verbal precision is an anachronism. It may be old-fashioned, but I was taught that thought is words, arranged in grammatically precise ways. There is a crisis of literacy in this country. One study estimates that some 30 million adult Americans are "functionally illiterate" and cannot read or write well enough to answer the want ad or understand the instructions on a medicine bottle. And while I would not be so simplistic as to suggest that television is the cause, I believe it contributes and is an influence. |