The boob tube. The idiot box. The brain fryer.
Television has been called a lot of things, and it is no less a revolution in communication and entertainment for its colloquial nomenclature, but like all tools, it was both shaped by man and shapes him as well. In addition to the association between aggression and television as mentioned in this week’s reading (Ewoldsen & Roskos, 2012), the media might have another impact on our minds: We might not just be watching programming but be programmed by it as well.
From its onset, television programs have been divided into segments, sandwiched in between commercial messages from their sponsors. Audiences soon learned to tune out what they deemed irrelevant through a sort of operant conditioning, anticipating when the content–or reward–would return and avoiding or ignoring what they didn’t enjoy. Advertisers employed several strategies to combat this inattention, from incorporating their products into the programs themselves to employing characters from the shows to appear in advertisements, like the Flintstones shilling cigarettes and beer (Pathak, 2013).
The Flintstones in a commercial for Winston cigarettes (image from Pathak, 2013)
As the line between content and commercials began to blur, and as the cost of that content continued to increase, television began to feature more ads. An hour of television in 1952 hosted perhaps eight minutes of ads; 50 years later, 20 minutes of that hour would air commercials (Schmidt, n.d.). Yet even as the commercial breaks grew longer, the ads themselves became progressively shorter. The initial 60-second clip was shortened to 30 in the 1970s, halved again to 15 in the 1990s, and sometimes appear as 5-second shorts today (Elliott, 2005). Much like the interdependent connection between the two established earlier, television content soon mirrored its ads. About 50 percent of news stories now are the length of a commercial–30 seconds or less–and the average soundbite is less than 8 (Jurkowitz et al., 2013; Fehrman, 2011). Is it any wonder that our attention may have followed?
(Image by Digital Brew, 2016)
The correlation between attention and television has been established in several studies. Two longitudinal studies that evaluated over a thousand children each found a strong correlation between television viewing habits in early childhood and later attention problems (Christakis et al., 2004; Landuis et al., 2007). More remarkable still, the effect of television on attention held constant even when the researchers controlled for other potentially confounding variables like socioeconomic status, early cognitive ability, early attention problems (Landuis et al., 2007) and characteristics of the mother, such as her age and whether she suffered from mental illness or substance abuse (Christakis et al., 2004). Both teams (Landuis et al., 2007; Christakis et al., 2004) postulated that television’s effects are cumulative and dose dependent in that the younger viewers start and the more they watch, the more significant the effects on attention.
“Brains are being rewired,” said Dana Boyd of Microsoft in a 2015 study the company did on attention and the media, although “any shift in stimuli results in a rewiring.” In other words, our minds adapt to the environment we expose them to, and our environment is now more media-rich than ever before. In 2000, when television reigned supreme over other forms of media and over our free time, the average human attention span was 12 seconds; in 2013, in the era of smartphones and dual-screening, it shrunk to 8, which is one second less than that of a goldfish (Microsoft, 2015). More than this, Microsoft (2015) found that the more forms of media a person uses, especially at once, the more their attention span suffers.
Surprised? Wait… Why is that again? (image from Oakley, 2016)
Unlike a goldfish, though, humans have the ability to keep information in their working memory for an indefinite amount of time if we choose to. While Microsoft’s researchers (2015) found that attention spans may be negatively correlated with media use, they also determined that the more participants used media the better they were at encoding information if their attention was engaged. In other words, television and the media may have increased our distractability and willingness to seek novelty and entertainment elsewhere if we’re bored, but it has not prevented us from diving deep into something that captures and keeps our interest, like Netflix binges, and remembering it afterwards. Perhaps Netflix itself, as an ad-free service, might even reverse attention the trend in time.
Television and advertising may have affected our attention spans, but so has nearly everything else in our environment. Our minds adapt and rewire themselves according to what we feed them, so our minds are made in our own image. The more of a role the media in general and television in particular plays in our lives, the more our minds adapt accordingly. Television is a tool, just like the telegraph and newspapers before it, and while it may shape us just as we shape it, we can still determine the impact it has on our lives. We can turn it off. Or at least skip the ads.
(Image by Wilson, 2012)
References
Christakis, D.A., Zimmerman, F.J., DiGiuseppe, D.L., & McCarty, C.A. (2004). Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children. Pediatrics, 113(4), 708-713. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2214.2004.00456_4.x
Digital Brew. (2016). Brief advice on videos for short attention spans [Image]. Retrieved from http://www.digitalbrew.com/tag/attention-span/
Elliott, S. (2005, APril 8). TV commercials adjust to a shorter attention span. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/business/media/tv-commercials-adjust-to-a-shorter-attention-span.html?_r=0
Ewoldsen, D.R., & Beverly Roskos, B. (2012). Applying social psychology to the media. In F.W. Schneider, J.A. Gruman, & L.M. Coutts (Eds.) Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems (2nd ed.). (135-163). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Fehrman, C. (2013, July 20). The incredible shrinking sound bite. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/02/the_incredible_shrinking_sound_bite/?page=full.
Jurkowitz, M., Hilton, P., Mitchell, A., Santhanam, L., Adams, S., …, & Vogt, N. (2013). The changing TV news landscape. The Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://stateofthemedia.org/2013/special-reports-landing-page/the-changing-tv-news-landscape/
Landhuis, C.E., Poulton, R., Welch, D., & Hancox, R.. (2007). Does childhood television viewing lead to attention problems in adolescence?: Results from a prospective longitudinal study. Pediatrics, 120, 532-537. doi:10.1542/peds.2007-0978
Microsoft. (2015). Attention spans. Microsoft Canada. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjm1YuMu_DPAhUCLyYKHX8ECVMQFggcMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fadvertising.microsoft.com%2Fen%2FWWDocs%2FUser%2Fdisplay%2Fcl%2Fresearchreport%2F31966%2Fen%2Fmicrosoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf&usg=AFQjCNH9ESnw0PZxSj4N2L4ARL3Vme7sqQ&sig2=Mmfzh6ZaCNUTIizL3zIFJQ&bvm=bv.136593572,d.cWw
Pathak, S. (2013, April 2). Yabba dabba cough!: Flashback to wen the Flintstones shilled cigarettes. Ad Age. Retrieved from http://adage.com/article/rewind/yabba-dabba-cough-flintstones-shilled-cigarettes/240572/
Oakley, N. (2016, July 28). Owning one pet goldfish is illegal in Switzerland–and the reason might make you feel guilty [Image]. The Mirror. Retrieved from http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/owning-one-pet-goldfish-illegal-8511105
Schmidt, W. (n.d.). How much TV commercial length has grown over the years. Retrieved from http://www.waynesthisandthat.com/commerciallength.htm
Wilson, C. (2012). Television zombie [Image]. Redbubble. Rpt. by http://www.sparklyprettybriiiight.com/ill-have-a-zombie-with-that-the-pop-culture-mainstreaming-of-sci-fi-and-fantasy/
Tags: attention, media, television
I can definitely see that I get bored more easily than I used to when watching tv. I find myself playing on my phone or doing something else. When I sit down with my family to watch a movie I don’t think we can go the whole movie without someone playing on their phone. When I was little you could sit all of us in front of the tv to watch a movie and we would totally enthralled. I can really see a difference since we have become a society of multi tasking. It has become harder and harder to just sit and do the some thing for even an hour. I can barely get through doing my homework without checking my phone. I think you are right that tv has changed our attentions spasm, but I think it is all the electronics we used day to day that are changing us.
The very first thing that I loved about your blog was the idea that TV is a tool that can actually program us. I agree with this concept because TV really does have a funny way of influencing us. Then you confirmed my idea with the longitudinal study that evaluated over a thousand children and found a connection between viewing tv at an early age and attention problems later in life. The statement made by Dana Boyd, “brains are being rewired” made me think of the neuroplasticity of the brain because the braid has the ability to change in a sense. Overall this was a great read thanks