New media, young audiences and discourses of attention: from Sesame Street to 'snack culture'
Michael Z. Newman
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 581
DOI: 10.1177/0163443710367693
PDF
Introduction (ed. GGA)
One need not look far to find claims in popular American discourse that today's attention spans are short. Central causes of shortened attention are typically assumed to include media technologies and forms of media content, especially those characterized by brevity and fragmentation, such as television commercials and web videos.
The putative victims of this supposed condition are often children or members of younger generations whose entire lives have been suffused with electronic media.
The linkage of attention deficit with emergent forms of media functions as a technophobic discourse of media effects, pathologizing a civilization too eager to adopt new tools of communication. If the attention span is imperiled, this can hardly bode well for society.
The idea of a connection between a culture's media and its collective habits and patterns of paying attention has been appealing to a number of influential thinkers,
the circulation of the notion of media-shortened attention has proceeded in popular discourse in the absence of compelling, expert-produced data, as a lay theory of media effects such as those studied by Ellen Seiter (1999).
The central concern of this article will not be to judge the validity of the (dubious) claim of media's power to stunt cognitive functioning, but to trace the way that the very idea of media affecting attention has circulated historically in American culture.
This article will consider the way this connection has been made in popular discourse in relation to American media aimed at young people, and also in the thinking of media creators, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the present day.
It considers the positioning of media as a threat, in particular to young viewers' minds. Reading popular discourse (such as newspapers, magazines, and books aimed at the general reader) is a way - however indirect - of accessing popular understandings of media and their social significance, as exemplified by the work of cultural media historians such as Lynn Spigel (1992).
Popular discourse about attention offers a way of understanding not only how media are positioned socially, but also how they are produced.
Makers of television, cinema, and web content are members of the society in which short-attention-span discourse circulates.
They internalize this discourse and, in turn, it explains their techniques.
Thus the popular notion of the shortened attention span functions in a kind of feedback loop running between media producers, writers for the popular press and the audience.
If producers believe that their audience's attention is weak or fleeting, then they have a special incentive to create textual experiences that make a strong appeal on the audience's attention.
In this context they must see their task as managing a fickle audience's attention. Knowing this about media producers reveals something significant about how media come to be the way they are. It will be especially important in considering the history of Sesame Street and MTV, both of which were fashioned to appeal to an audience of young people whose attention was thought to be especially challenging to capture and hold.
Conclusion
Since it has taken hold so effectively, the 'short attention span' must be quite appealing. Why might this be so? By way of concluding, I suggest two explanations for the acceptance of the notion that media shorten attention (aside from the obvious one that it might be true, which I acknowledge through my skepticism).
Michael Z. Newman
Media Culture Society 2010 32: 581
DOI: 10.1177/0163443710367693
Introduction (ed. GGA)
One need not look far to find claims in popular American discourse that today's attention spans are short. Central causes of shortened attention are typically assumed to include media technologies and forms of media content, especially those characterized by brevity and fragmentation, such as television commercials and web videos.
The putative victims of this supposed condition are often children or members of younger generations whose entire lives have been suffused with electronic media.
The linkage of attention deficit with emergent forms of media functions as a technophobic discourse of media effects, pathologizing a civilization too eager to adopt new tools of communication. If the attention span is imperiled, this can hardly bode well for society.
The idea of a connection between a culture's media and its collective habits and patterns of paying attention has been appealing to a number of influential thinkers,
the circulation of the notion of media-shortened attention has proceeded in popular discourse in the absence of compelling, expert-produced data, as a lay theory of media effects such as those studied by Ellen Seiter (1999).
The central concern of this article will not be to judge the validity of the (dubious) claim of media's power to stunt cognitive functioning, but to trace the way that the very idea of media affecting attention has circulated historically in American culture.
This article will consider the way this connection has been made in popular discourse in relation to American media aimed at young people, and also in the thinking of media creators, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing to the present day.
It considers the positioning of media as a threat, in particular to young viewers' minds. Reading popular discourse (such as newspapers, magazines, and books aimed at the general reader) is a way - however indirect - of accessing popular understandings of media and their social significance, as exemplified by the work of cultural media historians such as Lynn Spigel (1992).
Popular discourse about attention offers a way of understanding not only how media are positioned socially, but also how they are produced.
Makers of television, cinema, and web content are members of the society in which short-attention-span discourse circulates.
They internalize this discourse and, in turn, it explains their techniques.
Thus the popular notion of the shortened attention span functions in a kind of feedback loop running between media producers, writers for the popular press and the audience.
If producers believe that their audience's attention is weak or fleeting, then they have a special incentive to create textual experiences that make a strong appeal on the audience's attention.
In this context they must see their task as managing a fickle audience's attention. Knowing this about media producers reveals something significant about how media come to be the way they are. It will be especially important in considering the history of Sesame Street and MTV, both of which were fashioned to appeal to an audience of young people whose attention was thought to be especially challenging to capture and hold.
Conclusion
Since it has taken hold so effectively, the 'short attention span' must be quite appealing. Why might this be so? By way of concluding, I suggest two explanations for the acceptance of the notion that media shorten attention (aside from the obvious one that it might be true, which I acknowledge through my skepticism).
- First, thinking about media shrinking the attention span functions to manage anxiety over social and technological change. In the case of Sesame Street, the innovation of electronic education carries with it both a promise and a threat. It makes sense that the teachers whose role was threatened by the television version of education would fear this powerful rival. Or likewise that adults whose experience of popular music was on the radio would fear the merging of music and TV. The emergence and adoption of new media forms and technologies are often attended by various kinds of fear, distrust and even moral panic. For instance, in the 1930s, the Payne Fund Studies blamed the cinema for social ills, and the panic over comic books in the 1950s aroused similar fears in relation to comics. More recently, panics over predators on online social networks and abuse by adults of children's trust have shaped the adoption of new forms of socializing online. We might see the 'shortened attention span' as a strategy for coming to terms with new media and technological change - to help us feel we understand it better.
- Another explanation is that the idea functions to reassert ideological distinctions in the face of disrupted power dynamics and the breakdown of traditional social distinctions. For instance, it reasserts the superiority of adult culture (longer-form, more contemplative) over youth culture (faster-paced, more distracting) and of a traditional, establishment culture (print culture, the culture of educational institutions) over a threatening emergent culture (electronic visual culture, educational TV, myriad cable and satellite channels). Adults often fear and distrust the culture of children and youth, so we might see the idea of media shortening attention, and especially children's attention, as a way of adults coming to terms with the emergence of new forms of youth culture, such as music video and educational TV, that they might not have felt comfortable with and which had not been part of their experience. The sureness of explanations, even those that propose harmful and pervasive effects, might help manage a difficult change by imposing understanding on a chaotic, unpredictable world.
Ultimately, then, the 'short attention span' should be seen not as an inevitable consequence of a faster, more media-intensive culture in post-Sesame Street America, but as a discursive strategy for positioning new media forms within the familiar frames of the cognitive and moral endangerment of younger generations.
In essence it functions as a rhetoric of 'The kids these days!' Whether the kids - and adults - these days have been endangered or enlightened by new media, the logic of our lay theories of media in recent decades suggests that brave new worlds, for all their mesmerizing novelty and techno-utopian promise, augur moral and intellectual decline.
NOTES (ed. GGA)...
One objective of Sesame Street in its planning stages was to create a program format that children would want to watch -that would be appealing to them. It did so by copying the types of television that children were already spending so much time watching rather than following the more pedestrian style typical of educational television. As the popular press often reported, Sesame Street adopted the style of commercial television, including the 'sponsorship' of the show {'Sesame Street was brought to you by the letter J and the number 3'). It borrowed the 'magazine' format of variety comedy shows like Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which at the time of Sesame Street's debut in 1969 was the most popular program in America. The brevity of the segments in a magazine-format, commercial-style show was invariably linked to the attention span of the young audience for the show: this was a style that the producers believed suited them.
NOTES (ed. GGA)...
One objective of Sesame Street in its planning stages was to create a program format that children would want to watch -that would be appealing to them. It did so by copying the types of television that children were already spending so much time watching rather than following the more pedestrian style typical of educational television. As the popular press often reported, Sesame Street adopted the style of commercial television, including the 'sponsorship' of the show {'Sesame Street was brought to you by the letter J and the number 3'). It borrowed the 'magazine' format of variety comedy shows like Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, which at the time of Sesame Street's debut in 1969 was the most popular program in America. The brevity of the segments in a magazine-format, commercial-style show was invariably linked to the attention span of the young audience for the show: this was a style that the producers believed suited them.
Joan Ganz Cooney, the president of the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), wanted the show to mimic commercials by using 'frequent repetition, clever visual presentation, brevity and clarity' (Polsky, 1974: 11-12).
The CTW did extensive testing of Sesame Street segments to make sure they would hold children's attention by using a 'distractor', a screen placed next to the television on which bright colored slides would appear. Researchers could tell which Sesame Street segments held the viewer's attention better under conditions of external distraction. They also found that children would pay as much attention to Sesame Street as to commercial programs (Ickeringill, 1969).
In typical descriptions, the show was called fast-paced and quick-cut; but this simplified the way the show was made to capture children's attention. A psychologist who advised the CTW, Gerald Lesser, wrote that 'Children lose interest when the program dwells too long on one subject or remains too long at one pace or in one style.' His research had found that commercial television holds attention so well because of its variety of pace (not always fast) and mood.
Sesame Street was instrumental in popularizing the notion that television holds our attention by exploiting its essential formal features, the same ones that Benjamin and others, such as 1920s cinematic avant-garde theorists, had previously identified in cinema: movement, speed, constantly refreshed views. The idea that brief segments are considered essential for successful TV soon migrated to other formats besides children's programming and became central to a critique of television as a force of irrationality and de-intellectualization.
Clearly, then, in the 1970s there was an assumption circulating among professionals in the television industry, journalists and, we may assume, ordinary people as well, that there was an ideal condition of fit between formats of audiovisual representation and spectator psychology, and that this could be measured in the length of time the spectator was prepared to give his or her attention to a segment of audiovisual text. This applied to adults, not just children.
Also in the 1970s, the terms of this discussion shift in an important way. No longer merely responding to a psychological condition (brief attention span), now the technologies and forms of audiovisual representation were being blamed for the public's weak attention, and especially for children's inability to sustain attention at school.
Television's most successful techniques - short segments, fast action, quick cuts, fades, dissolves - break time into perceptual bits. Reading requires perceptual continuity to track line after line. Television habituates the mind to short takes, not to the continuity of thought required by reading. The pace and speed of television cause children to be easily distracted.... Focusing and paying attention to print become an unnatural strain for the conditioned TV viewer. (Moody, 1980: 63)
Neil Postman (1986:143) echoed this when he wrote that 'Sesame Street encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street.'
The evidence for all of this would seem to have been entirely anecdotal.
There was considerable concern in the 1970s over hyperactive (sometimes called 'hyperkinetic') children and TV was among a number of suspected culprits of this, which also included food additives and sugar.
Mander claimed that television commands our attention but not our cognitive activity, indeed that it suppresses active attention and makes viewers into zombies (in Sesame Street's case, one supposes, zombies who count and spell). But Mander claims that television makes children hyperactive as well. As Jason Mittell (2000) argues, detractors have often sowed fear of television by employing drug metaphors, and in this case the TV-as-drug is both sedative and stimulant. Again, the paradox of TV, according to these technophobic writers, is that it holds attention so well that it destroys the ability to pay attention.
By the 1980s, the idea of television's putative negative effects on attention and 'sustained thought' was well established; at the same time, television technologies and formats were developing and changing, and the emergence of new media in this era was understood within the context of the prevailing ideas about the moving image and its effects.
MTV emerged around the same time as a prominent new form of programming to appeal to young people, and it was based around a format rather than a schedule. In its early years, MTV rarely ran programs, but alternated music videos, video-jockey segments, bumpers (Ί Want My MTV) and commercials, many of which were similar in form and style. Time magazine put MTV on the cover in 1983 and, in the accompanying story, made clear that its appeal had to do with the way it addressed a TV-made audience: 'Whole generations have had their brains fried with a cathode ray tube, a condition that creates a certain impatience and shortness of attention when limited to aural input' (Cocks, 1983).
Among non-MTV television programs adopting the music video style was, famously, the high-concept police drama Miami Vice, which in its pilot episode pioneered the 'musical montage' convention, which became standard in prime-time television, layering on a sequence of atmospheric night-time driving images the MTV star Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight'.
This history of thinking about media and attention thus helps explain the emergence of what David Bordwell (2006) calls 'intensified continuity' as the reigning style of movies and television beginning around this time and running through to the present day. As Bordwell writes, the development of faster rates of cutting, a constantly moving camera, and other techniques typical of recent and contemporary visual style was encouraged by television viewing of movies, and by the opinion of filmmakers that TV viewers are easily distracted (2006: 150-1). He quotes the film director Sydney Pollock (who had started out directing TV) to this effect, saying: 'In television, you are always fighting for the viewer's attention' (2006: 265n.83).
Similarly, then, YouTube videos like the lonelygirll 5 series emerge in a context in which attention is believed to be scarce - a challenge to manage. The hundreds of channels I get through my DirecTV satellite box are nothing compared to the virtually infinite options I find in my web browser. This experience is central to the 'attention economy' we now supposedly live in (Davenport and Beck, 2001; Lanham, 2006), in which capturing consumers' attention is thought to be the top objective of marketing - more so even than selling products.
As new formats and technologies emerged, their introduction to the public was framed by a discourse that ascribes to media pervasive effects.
The CTW did extensive testing of Sesame Street segments to make sure they would hold children's attention by using a 'distractor', a screen placed next to the television on which bright colored slides would appear. Researchers could tell which Sesame Street segments held the viewer's attention better under conditions of external distraction. They also found that children would pay as much attention to Sesame Street as to commercial programs (Ickeringill, 1969).
In typical descriptions, the show was called fast-paced and quick-cut; but this simplified the way the show was made to capture children's attention. A psychologist who advised the CTW, Gerald Lesser, wrote that 'Children lose interest when the program dwells too long on one subject or remains too long at one pace or in one style.' His research had found that commercial television holds attention so well because of its variety of pace (not always fast) and mood.
Sesame Street was instrumental in popularizing the notion that television holds our attention by exploiting its essential formal features, the same ones that Benjamin and others, such as 1920s cinematic avant-garde theorists, had previously identified in cinema: movement, speed, constantly refreshed views. The idea that brief segments are considered essential for successful TV soon migrated to other formats besides children's programming and became central to a critique of television as a force of irrationality and de-intellectualization.
Clearly, then, in the 1970s there was an assumption circulating among professionals in the television industry, journalists and, we may assume, ordinary people as well, that there was an ideal condition of fit between formats of audiovisual representation and spectator psychology, and that this could be measured in the length of time the spectator was prepared to give his or her attention to a segment of audiovisual text. This applied to adults, not just children.
Also in the 1970s, the terms of this discussion shift in an important way. No longer merely responding to a psychological condition (brief attention span), now the technologies and forms of audiovisual representation were being blamed for the public's weak attention, and especially for children's inability to sustain attention at school.
Television's most successful techniques - short segments, fast action, quick cuts, fades, dissolves - break time into perceptual bits. Reading requires perceptual continuity to track line after line. Television habituates the mind to short takes, not to the continuity of thought required by reading. The pace and speed of television cause children to be easily distracted.... Focusing and paying attention to print become an unnatural strain for the conditioned TV viewer. (Moody, 1980: 63)
Neil Postman (1986:143) echoed this when he wrote that 'Sesame Street encourages children to love school only if school is like Sesame Street.'
The evidence for all of this would seem to have been entirely anecdotal.
There was considerable concern in the 1970s over hyperactive (sometimes called 'hyperkinetic') children and TV was among a number of suspected culprits of this, which also included food additives and sugar.
Mander claimed that television commands our attention but not our cognitive activity, indeed that it suppresses active attention and makes viewers into zombies (in Sesame Street's case, one supposes, zombies who count and spell). But Mander claims that television makes children hyperactive as well. As Jason Mittell (2000) argues, detractors have often sowed fear of television by employing drug metaphors, and in this case the TV-as-drug is both sedative and stimulant. Again, the paradox of TV, according to these technophobic writers, is that it holds attention so well that it destroys the ability to pay attention.
By the 1980s, the idea of television's putative negative effects on attention and 'sustained thought' was well established; at the same time, television technologies and formats were developing and changing, and the emergence of new media in this era was understood within the context of the prevailing ideas about the moving image and its effects.
MTV emerged around the same time as a prominent new form of programming to appeal to young people, and it was based around a format rather than a schedule. In its early years, MTV rarely ran programs, but alternated music videos, video-jockey segments, bumpers (Ί Want My MTV) and commercials, many of which were similar in form and style. Time magazine put MTV on the cover in 1983 and, in the accompanying story, made clear that its appeal had to do with the way it addressed a TV-made audience: 'Whole generations have had their brains fried with a cathode ray tube, a condition that creates a certain impatience and shortness of attention when limited to aural input' (Cocks, 1983).
Among non-MTV television programs adopting the music video style was, famously, the high-concept police drama Miami Vice, which in its pilot episode pioneered the 'musical montage' convention, which became standard in prime-time television, layering on a sequence of atmospheric night-time driving images the MTV star Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight'.
This history of thinking about media and attention thus helps explain the emergence of what David Bordwell (2006) calls 'intensified continuity' as the reigning style of movies and television beginning around this time and running through to the present day. As Bordwell writes, the development of faster rates of cutting, a constantly moving camera, and other techniques typical of recent and contemporary visual style was encouraged by television viewing of movies, and by the opinion of filmmakers that TV viewers are easily distracted (2006: 150-1). He quotes the film director Sydney Pollock (who had started out directing TV) to this effect, saying: 'In television, you are always fighting for the viewer's attention' (2006: 265n.83).
Similarly, then, YouTube videos like the lonelygirll 5 series emerge in a context in which attention is believed to be scarce - a challenge to manage. The hundreds of channels I get through my DirecTV satellite box are nothing compared to the virtually infinite options I find in my web browser. This experience is central to the 'attention economy' we now supposedly live in (Davenport and Beck, 2001; Lanham, 2006), in which capturing consumers' attention is thought to be the top objective of marketing - more so even than selling products.
As new formats and technologies emerged, their introduction to the public was framed by a discourse that ascribes to media pervasive effects.
In a sense it hardly matters whether media have shortened our attention span, or whether it even makes sense to speak of an 'attention span' at all, even less one widely shared across entire societies and generations.
The popular discourse exerts its power in shaping society and its mediated representations.
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