Web 2.0 and the birth of Distractainment

Yesterday was a bad day.  I made a mistake while wrapping a set, and that tiny imperfection grew into a mother of a problem.  Without revealing the nature of anything about the people, events, locations, or circumstances (bloggers get fired, remember), it ended with my boss and I having a serious chat about how I need to shape up or ship out.  It was emotionally draining, and when the onslaught was over and I could return home, I could think of no better outlet than to watch some web videos and have a good, long laugh.

After the third hour of chuckling at recent memes and political humor come to life, I began to think philosophically.  Why did I choose the web for my daily dose of humor?  Why does anybody?  Who makes these videos, and when?  How does anyone have the free time to do these, and what happens those people when they run out of steam?  I always seem to come down off of a great laugh with a sobering moment of inward thinking.

More people collectively watched the Evolution of Dance than watched the Superbowl last January.  It’s estimated that the modern office worker spends a quarter of their day on sites like on YouTube - which has been serving up 1 million video views every day.  Who uploads all that stuff, and why?  Why do we, the users, crave all this entertainment - and are never satisfied with just one or two gems?  We constantly surf, rate, comment, and move on.  If something isn’t worth our time, we simply do not grace it with our precious opinions and praise.  Somehow comments and hits have become new Nielson ratings.

Somehow over the last 50 years, we have become a culture obsessed with being distracted.  An interview I shot for a documentary on Italian immigrants had a 90 year-old man telling us that today’s kids don’t know how to play.  “In their day” they had little to do but run outside and make up their own games.  A brief bit of news and some annual festivals were enough to placate his generation - the only people seeking daily distractions were gossiping old ladies.  Was it the birth of our new consumer culture that drove the Baby Boomers (and beyond) to constantly seek out new ways of being amused?  Are television, videogames, and now the Internet simply an extension of the drive to get new stuff?

Have you seen The Story of Stuff?  Great piece.  It breaks down exactly how and when America became enslaved to buying new things.  The drive to have NEW! took over our lives after WW2, in a time where our economy needed this way of thinking.  This idea continued to spiral out of control at such a rapid rate that not only are we craving new things, but now we also need a steady flow of new entertainment.  With the rise of television, we saw a decrease in attention spans.  Since the advent of Sesame Street and the 60-second commercial, audiences no longer tolerate more than 2 sentences coming out of character’s mouth at any given time.  Watch prime time TV lately?  Name any show where a character says more than two lines in a row.  Three in a row is the new monologue.

Our cuts have become quicker and our scenes shorter.  Compare a slow-moving movie from the Hollywood Golden Age to any blockbuster of today.  We’re holding down the fast-forward button.  Now insert web-entertainment.  One of the golden rules of making a viral video is that it has to be 2 minutes in length.  I’ve heard this at podcasting seminars, in interviews, and from my fellow producers.  Why is this a rule?  Is everyone anticipating that audiences have no better sense to know when they’re watching a web video and when they’re being fed a commercial?  Or is it that our attention spans are so severely limited that (outside of legitimate theater) we cannot hold our interest for more than 120 seconds?  Is this the truth, or are we all being forced into some kind of ADD culture?  Is the two-minute standard a Blu-Ray, or is there a real purpose for the change?

Distractions.  We all need them.  My wife has been reading the Little House on the Prairie book series, and telling me about how the culture back then was completely different from today.  Farmers didn’t need movies.  They made up their own games and mostly just lived and worked.  What changed?  The older generation doesn’t watch home-made videos on YouTube.  They prefer to watch Law & Order and the evening News, which to their grandparents is just as bad / fast.   What will be the next evolution in our sped-up brains?  How can our entertainment get any quicker, or be served any faster?  Will we all just give up and go back to attending theater?  Perhaps the answer is already here.