Year of Gratitude - Day 108 - The New Yorker

The New Yorker magazine is one of those incredible fiction and nonfiction spectacles. Only the best are accepted, and not even all the best have made the cut. I had the pleasure of reading a great history of the magazine, About Town, by Ben Yagoda. It made me long for New York, but the book was fascinating and full of incredible history.

My review: http://knowledgeiscool.blogspot.com/2012/12/book-review-about-town.html

Year of Gratitude - Day 89 - Democracy Now!

Say what you will, I am grateful to have Democracy Now! as a news resource.

Year of Gratitude - Day 81 - "You've probably never even watched Fox News"

A friend of mine challenged me with that statement: "You've probably never even watched Fox News." Indeed, he was right. Whenever it came on, I couldn't stand to watch it for long. While I like to keep my politics to myself, I will admit to being fairly liberal, so Fox News really isn't my jam.

However, as I grow older, I realize that I have to be much more diligent when gathering my news. My old news feeds were all liberal, left-leaning papers. So after my friend challenged me to get in a little Fox News, I decided to add their top news to my feed. Strangely enough, it's actually been pretty great. When you remove the talking heads, Fox News doesn't do too terrible of a job reporting the news. 

I am grateful to have friends with many different perspectives. These kinds of interactions are what keep me a life long learner.

On Memory and Attention Spans

Nostalgia alert: I remember reading an article called the Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite in one of my undergraduate courses years ago. I reread it the other day and this made me think of Americans' shrinking attention span (and this was written in 1990!):

An analysis of all weekday evening network newscasts (over 280) from Labor Day to Election Day in 1968 and 1988 reveals that the average "sound bite" fell from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to only 9.8 seconds in 1988. Meanwhile the time the networks devoted to visuals of the candidates, accompanied by their words, increased by more than 300 percent.

I think in a way the internet both helps and hinders in a situation like this. Helps because people can cruise over to YouTube or iTunes and get newscasts, speeches, transcripts, etc. We can essentially pay as much or as little attention to candidates as we want. In the same breath, I think that the internet is also crushing our already feeble attention span. We are overloaded and I'm not sure how much information we're really retaining.

I wondered what impact these tiny spurts of attention will have on a more collective human memory. Because we pay attention to much more content in much shorter intervals, does that create huge gaps in our memories? Or does this information overload provide a workable outline in our thinking? How do we fill in an outline of very vague happenings or mere news headlines with actual substanance? Do the shorter but more diverse clips and sound bites paint a complete picture of reality? Is that picture accurate?

I found some interesting facts on short attention spans from a May 2000 USA Today Magazine article entitled "TELEVISION NEWS: INFORMATION OR INFOTAINMENT? by Michael Medved:

• Article calls the remote control the"most destructive invention of the 20th century." It went on to say a "CHANNELS magazine notes that the average adult male...changes stations every 19 minutes.
• In the 1950s, a typical camera shot lasted 35-50 seconds; in the 1990s, it was five seconds.
• Commercials are even more frenetic, often switching images after just one second.
• Americans watch TV 28 hours a week, which is more time than they spend on pursuing their careers or reading (for themselves or to their children).

Further, with these facts in mind, how is a person's memory effected when they are desensitized? When people are beat over the head with violent images or corrupt politicians or the critical state of the environment, do they try to FORGET these problems or understand them more?

For example, people are aware that terrorists are crazy, but are they trying to understand why these people are that way? People know that the earth's climate is changing, but do they know the direct impact of, say, rising sea levels on their part of the world, or others? People know that we can't rely just on energy from oil forever, but do they know that if we use ethanol than world food prices will increase, as has been the case?

Basically, what I'm asking is what the heck DO we remember? Is it more? Less? Or more info with less detail (more awareness, less understanding???) How does the shortness of our attention effect what we remember 10-20-30 years down the line? I think this would be an interesting study to do. I've made a note to myself. If you're looking for a thesis, though, feel free to go for it. I look forward to you doing all the painstaking research and me just reading about it later on.

One final thing, the two articles I cited here are 17 and 7 years old. I wonder how absurdly short our attention spans are now.

Book Review: Bad News

Bad News, by Tom Fenton
The full title of this book is Bad News: the decline of reporting, the business of news, and the danger to us all. Although all things journalism interest me, this book did not. Here's my story...

First, it was primarily about television journalists (which sounds like an oxymoron). I think what Fenton tried to do was discuss broadcast news overall, but he bearly touched on radio or internet news. I've always had a bias for the print journalists out there and this book reenforced that sentiment. So, the subject matter was not my favorite.

The book was also slightly out of date which is more my fault for picking it up 3 years after publication. Generally, "better late than never" is a good rule to go by, but "never" would have been a better plan when it came to reading this book. There is some mention of Iran still producing nuclear arms, which turned out to be wrong. The author shows his age as he claims, essentially, that young people don't care about foreign news. Of course, mentions of blogs, online reporting and the like are almost non-existent in this book. I find it funny that Fenton bags young people when he doesn't even mention some of the most popular media outlets. He scoffs at the Daily Show and condescends more than a few times.

The writing was pretty bad. I thought maybe it was just kind of boring, but I longed for the ending and seriously thought it would never come. I was mostly skimming by the end. There was a lot of material to work through, especially some background on Russia, China, the Middle East and the variety of ways they're tied together (through oil, war, policy, etc). There was too much material and not enough good, engaging writing to put it all together. I'm still deciding if I learned anything new from it. Ironically enough, it seemed as though it was a bunch of print journalists' materials regurgitated into this guy's book.

Not only was the subject matter dated, but technical aspects of the writing were weak. I found a typo at the beginning of each chapter and I think I came across a misspelling as well. There were some good quotes from some big-time broadcasters, but far more were bad. They either went on too long or were spliced up by so many commas, one didn't know when to pause and when to think. I also didn't feel there were tons of facts to back up Fenton's claims. Finally, this book is chock full of questions. They're EVERYWHERE. I saw more question marks where I rather would have seen either answers or thoughtful insight.

I do not recommend this book. I'm actually reading a very nice contrast called Made to Stick, which talks about creating successful ideas. A lot of it is about writing and all of it provides better insights on ways the media could improve (even though that's NOT the main goal of the book). I will be sure to review that one, as well.

Fenton's book is more a book of complaints and questions that take the reader in rhetorical circles.