Media’s Hold On Our Time & Attention

Storytelling is powerful, and in the deepest sense, magical. Skillful storytellers burrow deep into our minds, hearts, and souls. More than we know, we’re affected by characters, storylines, context, authority, myths and legends (ancient and modern), storytellers, and messages.

Of the 24 hours available each day, adults spend a third of that time sleeping (the national average is 8.5 hours). Total waking hours: 15.5. We spend 2.6 of them watching TV, and another hour browsing the web, reading emails, browsing magazines, listening to the radio, and catching the occasional billboard, sign, or poster. It would be fair to say that we spend nearly 4 hours each day-- 1 in 4 of our waking hours, every day of our lives-- in the midst of programs, stories, advertisements, and marketing messages whose content is dominated by Fortune 500 companies.

Our best storytellers are employed by corporations. They are paid to be concerned about shareholder value, not the public good.

Joe Camel didn’t become well known by six year olds because he was cute. He became well known because Clear Channel, Viacom, and Lamar—the nation’s largest billboard companies—plastered his enormous puss on billboards in places where children were likely to see them.

Children don’t pass a McDonald’s and decide they’re hungry for a Happy Meal. McDonalds’ commercials bribe children to take their parents to the restaurants with the promise of a toy (often promoting a new kids’ movie).

Lucky Charms teaches children the morning cereal habit by combining fantasy (a leprechaun and a rainbow) with a “magically delicious” cereal that contains colorful marshmallow candy. Through the magic of storytelling, commercials teach “It’s okay to have candy for breakfast.”

On A&E’s Biography, even the most complicated lives are reduced to an hour-long magazine-style documentary. On the Scripps networks (Food Network, HGTV, etc.) and on the Discovery networks (Discovery, TLC, etc.), people who do the hard work are cheerful and get along (or charmingly disagreeable); results are always handsome and stories always resolve with clear endings. Homes are remade in an hour; gargantuan machine shop projects are planned, built, tested and launched without serious mishap. We watch these tidy stories because they are nicely packaged and entertaining. We try our best to filter their odd sense of reality, propriety, and proportion. When we watch these stories for a quarter of our waking lives, their skewed reality inevitably affects our perceptions and real life expectations.

For many of us, a nuanced understanding of the American legal system runs as deep as all that we’ve learned from CSI, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, and 11PM newscasts. We know what the bad guys look like, how they behave, and the neighborhoods where criminals lurk because we’ve watched stories about prostitution, drug wars, gangs, random shootings, and arsonists. Our attention is diverted from other crimes or investigations whose stories are complicated, insignificant, or politically sensitive. A good shooting always aces a tangled matrix of corporate or government misbehavior or an exploration of sometimes-contradictory ethical or social concerns. Night after night, week after week, in Philadelphia and in Buffalo, there are stories of bad Black men and their out-of-control gunplay; in Los Angeles and Dallas-Fort Worth, there are stories of bad Latino men and their out-of-control gunplay. We know the bad guys. We know who they are, how they think, and why they ought to be punished.

Stories leave a deep and long-lasting impression, a cumulative impression that operates at a conscious and sub-conscious level. (This is why advertisers buy flights of many commercials over weeks or months--to lay in lots of impressions.) Effects manifest themselves over time. Gradually, moment by moment and year by year, acceptable levels of sexuality, violence, frank adult storylines, graphic images, shorthand messages, and simple-minded stories become the norm. In time, storytelling changes the way we think about our lives. “We become blunted by all of the hype, jolts, shock, information overload, we never even notice the supermodel, even if she is scantily clad.”

It’s rare that a story is as simple as one person shooting another. There are always reasons why: reasons the shooter had the gun in the first place, reasons why the shooter became a shooter, why he or she selected a particular target or no particular target at all. Television has no time for context; in order to keep the viewer’s attention--our attention--they must keep moving, to the next shooter, the next fire, the next human tragedy.