© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 96
I had to talk to some people from a radio station in the course of the last week. I had a bunch of information that I needed dinned into the heads of a certain market. The idea seemed fairly sound. And everything seemed simple enough: hand on the information and get the job over and done with. I didn’t count on Murphy.
The station asked me to cut back to a minute on the basis of the attention span of the audience. So there you have it, folks. Alongside the limited literacy that leads to articles of a couple of sentences, and insightful factoids telling you about the mating habits of yaks at high altitude or the state of the nation’s underwear, we are now faced with the sort of attention span that makes one minute of radio the limit to how far we can go.
This sort of attention span might have some benefit in the realm of diplomacy. Diplomats could utter their threats more succinctly and go home feeling thoroughly justified in their righteous anger, yet warmed by the whole prospect of a full day of relaxation ahead of them. But when a radio talk has to be limited to a minute, I tend to get somewhat afraid. Somewhat very afraid.
Personally, I blame the media.
When I went to school, we had to read books. These were quite long books, and often incredibly dull. But the point was that we had to read them from cover to cover and understand what was in them.
If the study of literature had been guided by a media practitioner, we could have skipped actually reading Shakespeare or Dickens, and just scanned through some abbreviated study notes, possibly with interesting factoids about Elizabethan personal hygiene to make the whole process more rewarding. But it didn’t happen that way. We had to have wits and intelligence to make it through the book and the class. And the same applied to all the other subjects.
Wits and intelligence were developed in school as necessary life skills. Can there be any measure of success entailed in being able to comprehend the contents of a factoid about the beer consumption habits of Coptic monks or an eight line article on a man rushed to casualty after failing to gratify himself with a vacuum cleaner and a length of bungee cord?
I remember a time when radio plays lasted forty-five minutes, and they didn’t even have ad breaks in them. I also remember a time when an incisive piece of investigative journalism was measured in double digit pages, at least in magazines, not double digit lines.
Face it. The world seems to be ‘dumbing down’.
I had a talk to a friend, not so long ago in which he pointed out that the ability to comprehend a memo was a strategic issue in at least one major organization. No doubt it is a similar pattern in other organizations. The conversation then skirted the issue of willingness and ability to actually read memos. At that point everything seemed to become far more diplomatic. Some things are best left unspoken yet inferred, and couching them in a diplomatic way is the best way to make certain that they remain between the lines.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for being tactless and blunt. If people can’t read well, or if they have no desire to read, or if their attention span is so limited that a minute of radio is a challenge, is there a future for any organization, or for anything else? In pandering to low levels of literacy, in accepting short attention spans as the rule, rather than the exception, the media is paving the way to a new dark age.
Consider this factoid. In the dark ages, one of the saints was widely recognised as a genius because he could read without moving his lips. Nowadays and once again, people who move their lips while reading are not entirely unusual.
Amongst all the talk about global warming, poverty, disease trajectories and water wars, the worst threat is that which is completely ignored. If we can’t read or pay attention, we will be robbed of our ability to understand and react to threats.
Now you know why a limit of one minute on radio is so very, very frightening.
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