Television: TV dramas are losing favor with busy television viewers
Ah, the dilemma of the multitasking viewer.
Interesting story (by Joe Flint) above in the Los Angeles Times about how difficult it is to keep viewers interested in any but the most simplistic plotlines. One executive says “most viewers are watching television with a laptop on their legs,” which is an obvious exaggeration, but according to other research cited, about 20% of the audience is using a computer, an Ipad or a smartphone while trying to keep up with a network drama plot.
The result isn’t good for anyone involved with drama from the creatives involved to the execs to the companies buying ads that no one is watching. From where I sit, this means fewer jobs than ever for writers in Hollywood. Also from where I sit as a fan and TV viewer, it means more inane reality series. Please, please, don’t foist more real housewives upon us, I think we get it!
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In public, where I used to occupy my hands with something like smoking (quit 20 years ago) now to combat nervousness or boredom I do the same thing, play with Iphone.Tap, tap, tap, slide.
I can’t tell you how long it takes me to get through a 43 minute episode of a standard TV drama on Hulu or Netflix. Because I constantly pause, check other things, get up and go to the kitchen, the bathroom, the mailbox, the whatever. I will say I always return, and rarely if ever do I bail on an episode once I’ve started. If you’d told me years ago I’d develop this kind of technology-inspired adult ADD I’d have said you were nuts.
But here I am. So, ‘fess up, who else multitasks while watching TV?
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Not me! I am a writer and director’s dream audience. If I decide to watch an episode of something, I watch it–Mad Men, Wallander, 24 (brain candy!), whatever. I really don’t do anything else. Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes pause to go off somewhere else for a bit, but I don’t do anything else while I am watching it–I don’t use the computer, or read, or use the phone.
All this scattered (and scatterbrained) “multitasking” is symptomatic of a much larger looming problem, I think, that we have not yet begun to see the shape of. I have younger colleagues who literally CANNOT put down their little mechanical friend. I sat next to a woman who surfed and texted her way through a friend’s wedding. I sat next to a person who emailed and texted through a very nice event last Saturday. I have students who cannot last 30 minutes without texting.
One of the saddest things about this is that they are not pursuing anything worthwhile with all this use of technology. They’re blogging about what they had for breakfast, posting a picture of their new purse, tweeting that they just went to Walgreen’s and following all that same minutiae that their cyber-friends are posting. Nothing useful or meaningful is going on. It’s all just crap. I know ENGLISH TEACHERS who don’t read real books anymore because it’s too “boring” and it “takes too long.”
I laughed when I read the last part. Truly frightening, yes? The technology gurus keep trying to convince us that the minutiae is worth something, but I remain unconvinced. Still, it’s very seductive for procrastinators (like me) yet when I do unplug and remember what it was like, I like it a lot. I’ve discovered I have to either turn off the computer or leave the phone in another room otherwise there is no way I will not turn to one or the other during a TV program. Sad, I know. I did, at one point, have great concentration.
If you have enough concentration left LOL, there was a great article in The Atlantic (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”) worth the time it takes to read, It IS kind of long, ha ha ha.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/