Wednesday, June 18, 1997

Nation incapable of undivided attention

By Bob Greene

What we believe to be true often turns around to fool us completely.

When television first arrived on the American scene, some social commentators predicted that it would bring the dissolution of community as this country had always known it. Television, or so the theory went, would cause people who once talked over back-yard fences or on small-town sidewalks to stay inside, staring at a glowing tube. Instead of interacting with each other, people would become silent receptacles for what was being sent over the airwaves.

In one sense, this prediction did come true. The United States became a nation of watchers; families that would never have thought of eating anywhere other than the dinner table now sat perched in front of metal trays attached to high metal legs - they jabbed at their dinners while their eyes were trained upon the TV set, saying little to each other, offering deference to whatever was being done and said on that set.

Yet - as irrevocably as the advent of television altered the texture of American life - a strong argument can be made that it actually created a sense of national community, rather than destroyed that sense.

Because - back in the days when the three major networks were almost all there was to watch on television - the country, for the first time, had a daily connective thread: Everyone could talk about the same thing.

Network radio, of course, had offered up a similar thread, but you couldn't see the actors, reporters and newsmakers on the radio - each person's perception of the men and women behind those radio voices was different. With television, a face could appear before a camera in New York, and that face would be the impetus for office, factory and grocery store conversations in every town in the nation the next morning.

This may have been good and it may have been bad - and the quality of the programs that influenced this new national discourse was at best uneven. But television - because it became so universally accepted in such an astonishingly brief period of time - created a new sense of community at the same time it was doing away with the old definition of community.

And now? Business writers have reported recently that the major networks find themselves, for the first time since the invention of television, with an audience share of less than half the people who are watching TV at a given moment. This would have been unthinkable as recently as 10 years ago. But with the explosion of the number of cable channels, the rise in independent stations and startup networks, direct-delivery satellite TV and other innovations, the big traditional networks can no longer make the assumption that everyone who has a TV set will be watching them.

This would be merely a financial story - a what-will-become-of-the-networks story - were it not for the broader implications of the change. Because if Americans are dividing their attentions between 60-plus cable channels, plus movies rented at the corner video store and played through the TV set, plus pay-per-view programs - not to mention diversions offered by the worldwide computer network ...

If that happens - and it is - then there is a very different sense of national dialogue than the one we have become used to over the last 50 or so years. People aren't talking about the same thing in the morning, because they haven't seen the same thing the night before. Ted Turner himself recently said that "Americans suffer from information overload" - and if Turner, one of the people most responsible for the buildup of that overload, can be perplexed by it, then you know it's genuine.

Information overload is guaranteed to make people dizzy - not only are they not talking about the same thing every morning, they're not even sure precisely what media stimuli they were bombarded with the night before. It's all a confusing blur. We will never return to the days of three television networks; that's over and done.

But on some future morning, when everyone's heads are buzzing with the images and sounds and data streams that have rained down upon them the night before, someone may come up with what seems like a revolutionary new communications device:

The back-yard fence. No modem required; no surge protector necessary.

Chicago Tribune