A Change of Scenery

A friend of mine recently noted the decline of baseball’s popularity. My immediate thought was that baseball requires an attention span, something increasingly rare. This begs the question: Why is a long attention span increasingly rare? One explanation is the popularity of electronic media.

I recently wrote about how many hours a day people (especially children) spend watching television, and that the picture of the world that it presents is truncated and distorted in some particularly insidious ways. One of those ways is the relationship between the viewer's body and the image.

Imagine yourself taking a walk in the woods. You exert your body and move across an unmoving landscape. When you stop exerting yourself, the scene stops changing. Your perception of the world changes according to your voluntary physical movement, whether that is walking, running, lying down, or turning your head. It changes in a smooth, linear fashion, without jumps or gaps.

When you are watching television, your body remains static, but the scene in front of you changes. Not only that, but it changes quickly. A few years ago a study of TV camera work showed that the average shot length, that is, the average amount of time that one view of the scene stayed on the screen, was one and a half seconds. This was down from five seconds some years before. The only way you can get this effect in real life is by blinking rapidly as you fall down a flight of stairs.

Now, consider your average kid at home and then in school. For part of the day this child sits motionless, passive, watching a scene change every 1.5 seconds, accompanied by a sound track and special effects. Then the kid is expected to sit motionless and watch a teacher for 7 hours a day. In the classroom the scene never changes. There is no music or special effects. What a disappointment! The child has been patterned to expect a world that jumps and skips on its own. Call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in a box.

Turn on the TV and find a baseball game. The shot length of a ballgame is dead slow. There is no music. There are no special effects. You have to concentrate on each scene. The ritual plays itself out at its own unhurried pace. If you actually go to a ballgame, the apparent shot length is hours long. The TV watching public isn't conditioned to pay attention to one thing for this period of time.

American football seems to have made the transition to short shot length, with a dozen different cameras, whirling graphics full of statistics, and multiple angle instant replay.

On a similar front, a friend of mine who teaches at the college level reports that her students engage in incontinent text messaging in class. She forbade it, and then had to back the prohibition with grade point loss when it didn't stop. It was as if they were addicted to the constant connection, or perhaps the multitasking. ”Being here now” isn't enough.

Any addiction ends up being about dopamine, the brain chemical that signals reward when it floods the anterior cingulate. Drugs, gambling, risky behavior, and electronic entertainment all can short circuit our dopamine response. Our ever craving brains want that instant, elevated dopamine hit that artificial means provide. The downside of the first three means is obvious, but we should consider the consequences of electronic media addiction: a distorted worldview, social isolation, depression, and physical inactivity. The increasingly violent and degrading content available on electronic recorded media also provides the ability to ramp up the emotional shock value of the experience on demand. It's as if someone could increase a drug dosage without ever physically overdosing. The most damaging thing could be a reduced ability to experience and enjoy the natural world, with its indifference to our cravings, its three dimensional complexity, and its independent pace.

Turn off, tune out, slow down. You could go for a walk in the woods. You could go to a baseball game.

Comments

[Haik Bedrosian]

Baseball on TV puts me to sleep, literally. That's the only reason I watch it sometimes. Nice to sleep to.