Archive for July, 2009
On noise: a judge who gets it, part 2
Posted by R. Freedman in Media noise on July 29th, 2009
One of our posts on noise abuses a couple of weeks ago generated commentary on Reddit, the content-sharing site. The comments are worth sharing because they echo the divide among people when it comes to noise issues. For critics, noise issues seem so straight forward. If someone is playing music too loudly, it’s common courtesy to turn it down. We live in one world, so we need to try to create conditions in which we can all live together harmoniously. For others, noise is about individual freedom. No one owns the air, so if I want to play my music loudly, I can and will, and if anybody tries to stop me, they’ll have to do so with their fist.
In the post in question, a judge had thrown the book at late-night noisemakers who upset their neighbors. After the neighbors complained, the noisemakers tried to retaliate and were later arrested after trying to set fire to one of the neighbor’s porch, among other things.
The judge wasn’t in the mood to fool around and wanted to send a message about retaliation (which, if you follow noise issues, you quickly see is a recurring problem).
In the post, we talked about the case and also talked about backyard TV, a growing trend that we think will soon be causing problems similar to what we’re seeing with loud stereos.
Here are some of the comments. You can read them all at the Reddit comment page.
4 months in prison for inconveniencing your neighbors is barbaric.
–-jjjam
Attempting to light a porch on fire is an inconvenience?
—gromdul
Yeah, not to mention costly. First, you have to buy the oil unless you’re lucky enough to already have some of it handy. Second, you have to saunter over to your neighbors fence and pour the oil, all the while being careful enough not to spill any on your brand new sneakers. Thirdly, on a windy night it’s pretty darn hard to light your oil especially if all you have is matches. Plus, he’s trying to have a party!
–-inspy
“If it’s not TV in their backyards its custom pipes on their motorcycles.”
First of all, as far as the motorcycle thing, loud pipes save lives. But secondly, who has a TV in their backyard? Is this some kind of american thing? I’ve never seen anyone with a TV outdoors.
—streen
Jesus Christ! 26 minutes and a “loud pipes save lives” tard has already posted. Hey Streen, got any scientific evidence of that? Why don’t police departments use loud pipes then? Why don’t insurance companies mandate them? And if you really want the best chances of staying alive, DON’T RIDE A MOTORCYCLE.
Yeesh.
—encephlavator
Media captivity = enhancement. Huh?
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on July 28th, 2009
What part of “captivity” do media executives not get?
A press release dated July 17 talks about a distribution arrangement for an out-of-home media network that provides programming and ads for TVs in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary about the release, but like so many communications of this type, in which out-of-home media executives talk about their programming, there is no recognition that they’re force-feeding audio and video content onto people, at least some of whom do not want to have that content thrust upon them.
“One of our key company objectives is to improve the wait time experience by offering digital media that is entertaining and educational,” the head of the company says.
“Improve” is the problematic word. Embedded in this word is the assumption that adding TV to an environment where people can’t choose not to watch it makes the environment better. By whose standard? Who is the judge that’s decided, for everyone in that environment, that TV makes the environment better?
When we were researching a book on captive-audience media, we discovered case after case in which media executives say one thing—people love their TVs—while consumers say another—how much they hate being made captive to TV they can’t escape except at high personal cost.
No doubt executives of out-of-home media companies genuinely believe their TVs improve environments. What’s more, the content might be good. But many people resent being made captive to audio-video content that they can’t escape. Audio-video content is not like print content. It can’t be ignored. Media executives know this. Again, while we were researching our book, we came across quote after quote in which media executives tout their media platforms to advertisers on the basis that people cannot ignore the content.
Force-feeding audio-video content to people is considered offensive by many people and provokes resentment. Charles L. Black, Jr., the famed legal theorist whose work underwrites some of out most far-reaching decisions, like Brown vs. Board of Education, finds captive-audience media an offensive assault on our liberty. U.S. Supreme Court justices William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter do as well.
It’s safe to say that none of these renowned legal thinkers would find the waiting room experience enhanced by inescapable TV. So when media executives talk with such certainty about enhancing our experience, exactly whose experience are they enhancing?
First-ever exclusive look at captive-audience media, from Algora Publishing
If you’re interested in reading more about audience captivity, the book we referenced above is available from Algora Publishing in New York City. It’s called Noise Wars: Audience Captivity and Our Loss of Autonomy.
Social journalism’s evil nemesis
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on July 22nd, 2009
It’s impossible to be in journalism today and not recognize the irrepressible force of citizen journalism. The use of social media platforms as a way to report what’s going on in the world is one of those developments few people saw coming in the early days of social media but that today is clearly paradigm-shifting. Who can help but be moved by the role of Twitter in spreading news from inside Iran?
And yet growing in tandem with this wonderfully democratic way to report news is its antithesis, captive-audience media. This is the force-feeding of audio and video media in places specifically designed to make us captive to content we haven’t asked for and from which we can’t escape except at great opportunity cost to ourselves.
Here the media is anything but democratic. The content is intended solely to deliver captive eyeballs to whoever is paying the freight. Riding in a public commuter bus? The TV delivers inane ads and infotainment to the captive riders. Riding on a commuter train or subway car? TVs are being introduced on these platforms to bring in ad revenue to cash-strapped transportation agencies.
TVs on taxis, elevators, in public restrooms, on street corners, even on street furniture like bus stops.
This new media is different from the prnt ads we’re so used to seeing in every nook and cranny of our world. Print media is what you might call “pull” media because no one consumes its content unless they want to. No one can force you to read an advertisement. But audio-video media is “push” media and pushes out to everyone regardless of whether they want to consume it or not.
It’s ironic that at a time when information is flowing more freely than ever before, we find ourselves at the beginning of a disturbing trend of captive-audience media, what executives in the business refer to as out-of-home video or digital media platforms.
In classic Orwellian fashion we’re told we like captive-audience media because it entertains us and provides us with relevant information at a time when we’re receptive to it. Of course, they might add that they’re bringing TV to us because we’re increasingly not at home to watch TV there. So, are they trying to provide us a service or find a way to recapture lost ad revenue?
To be sure, many people like having TV to watch while they’re filling their car with gas or riding on a commuter bus, but because “push” media isn’t something that can be ignored, it’s despotic to force audio-video content onto people who don’t wish to consume it.
This is not a new complaint. Fifty years ago, after a classic captive-audience case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the eminent law theorist Charles L. Black, Jr. decried captive-audience media as sinster, coercive, insulting, degrading, and, to top it all off, a thing to make your flesh crawl.
Joining with him in this opinion are some of our country’s greatest jurists, including William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter. The three of them know something about liberty and freedom. I’m guessing they would applaud citizen journalism as a trend that’s moving us closer to a democratic ideal; we already know they’re repelled by captive-audience media as the absolutely furthest thing from that.
How these two opposites can grow up in parallel is certainly one of the more curious developments of our new world of commuications.
If audience captivity is important to you, we invite you to support Algora Publishing in New York City, which is releasing Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy, of which we’re the author.
First-ever exclusive look at captive-audience media, from Algora Publishing
Out-of-home media lives in its own reality
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on July 21st, 2009
Although it’s one of the fastest growing categories of media, out-of-home video platforms (what we call captive-audience media in this blog) have yet to attract some of the advertising world’s biggest traditional players. In an essay that in part looks at why this might be, a media executive provides four possible answers. Among them: the media is too new for advertisers to have a handle on it yet, and the still-evolving metrics for counting impact are a hinderance. But he leaves out what we would consider the biggest one: people resent being made captive to unwanted media, and advertisers, knowing this, don’t want to link their brand equity to a platform that generates hostility.
First-ever exclusive look at captive-audience media, from Algora Publishing
Of course, in the captive-audience media world, that’s an idea that doesn’t compute. In this world, people love being made captive to video programming and commercials that they haven’t asked for. They find the content useful and entertaining, and the players in the industry have survey after survey showing just how much people love having TV they haven’t asked for and from which they can’t easily escape.
But we would beg to differ. While writing Noise Wars, the book on the topic that’s just been released from Algora Publishing in New York City, we came across lots of industry-commissioned surveys that show just how much we love being made captive to unwanted media. Yet when you actually talk to people or spend time looking at what they say to each other in online forums or other venues in which opinions are discussed freely, the picture you get is considerably different. You get people describing point-of-sale TV in grocery stores, for example, as annoying, irritating, and enough to drive them out of the store forever. And those are just the printable comments.
Captive-audience advertising in movie theaters? We’ve yet to meet a single person that finds pre-movie ads anything but an intrusion between the patron and the movie they’ve paid good money to see. Far from patronizing the advertisers, they make it a point to take their money elsewhere if they’re ever in the market for whatever the pre-movie advertiser is selling.
And don’t even talk about captive-audience platforms, like BusRadio and Channel One, that target kids in school or on their way to school. Would you want to advertise your product on platforms that have been denounced by virtually every parent, religious, social, and educational organization in the United States? Even members of Congress have gone on record calling such platforms abusive.
Surveys commissioned by companies to support what they’re doing are just that. It’s not that such surveys are incorrect. I’m sure they meet all the standards of surveying. But as the eminent law professor Charles L. Black, Jr., said in his classic essay on captive-audience media, called “He Cannot Choose But Hear: The Plight of the Captive Auditor,” such surveys are “tame” and produce their “unsurprising results.”
To be sure, critics of captive-audience media are surely a minority, at least when each captive-audience platform is looked at in isolation from all others. That is, if you ask bus riders whether they like having TV on the bus, most would say it’s OK as long as the content is entertaining.
But now take the question out of a specific context and ask, Would you like to be made captive to video content from which you can escape only at great opportunity cost to yourself, throughout the out-of-home environment? That would mean on the bus, train, subway, taxi, and elevator, and on the street corner, at the bus stop, and while you’re pumping gas, shopping for groceries, waiting for your doctor, and using a public restroom?
Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “The Murderer” shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952 gave its OK to captive-audience media on a commuter rail in Washington. D.C. (That decision was the genesis of Charles Black’s classic essay mentioned above). In the story, captive-audience media permeates the environment, both inside and outside the home. The story ends with the protagonist comfortably ensconced in a cell, because it’s the only place left where he’s not made captive to media.
Captive-audience media: Charles Black was on the case
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise, TV Turnoff on July 16th, 2009
If there is one person I wouldn’t want to go up against in a court of law it’s Charles L. Black, Jr., the famed professor of constitutional law at Yale and Columbia University. In his heyday, during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, his was one of the most prominent voices on desegregation (Brown vs. Board of Education) and presidential impeachment, and was widely regarded by his peers as one of the top constitutional authorities of his generation. Sadly, he was never appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court because, had he been, it’s very possible that captive-audience media, a cause de celebre in the view of this blog, would have been deemed a generation ago an unconstitutional abridgment of individual liberty, and we never would have had to launch this blog. Thus, all the time we devote to this blog could have been spent on much more bright and positive pursuits, such as talking about the good ways to offer information to people (there are such ways)—that is, ways that treat people with the respect and dignity they’re owed.
As it is, a divided Supreme Court in 1952 overturned a unanimous lower court and gave an okay to captive-audience media on a commuter rail in Washington, D.C. The end result of that decision is what we’re faced with today: TV on buses, trains, subways, taxis, elevators, street corners, bus stops, ad infinitum. Any place where people gather is now fair game for someone to impose TV or other intrusive media on whoever happens to be captive in that environment at that time. And make no mistake: the executives who operated the captive-audience media on that 1952 commuter rail totally understood what they were doing. One of the company executives described the service as “delivering a guaranteed audience . . . . If they can hear, they can hear your commercial.”
Of course, even the Supreme Court had some mixed feelings about audience captivity. Just a few years prior to that case it said it was okay for a city to ban the use of audio trucks for commercial purposes (trucks that drive around for the purpose of blaring out commercial messages to pedestrians. Such bans don’t represent an unconstitutional violation of free speech because it’s not the speech that’s being banned but the delivery mechanism. As the court clearly saw, allowing anybody with speakers on a truck to drive around pushing out whatever message they want turns people into captives because they have no opportunity to say no.
Why was audience captivity not okay in that case but okay in the commuter rail case? The difference turned on the idea of tacit permission. Since the train riders voluntarily took the rail service, they gave their tacit permission to be made captives to the commercial media.
To the judges who dissented in the case, that’s a pretty thin reed on which to draw a distinction. For some commuters, taking the rail is hardly a choice; it’s the only practical way for them to get in and out of town every day. Thus, as Justice William O. Douglas said, “Compulsion which comes from circumstances can be just as real as compulsion which comes from necessity.”
In any case, we are where we are in terms of captive-audience media. But as Charles Black made clear in what’s widely regarded as a classic essay on liberty, He Cannot Choose But Hear: The Plight of the Captive Auditor, which he wrote after the commuter-rail decision, the Supreme Court decision doesn’t mean we have to allow audience captivity. There are plenty of ways to fight it. Nothing in that decision affects our rights to appeal for curbs at the legislative, council, and commission levels of government, not to mention in the court of public opinion.
It’s in this spirit of appealing to the court of public opinion that Algora Publishing, a literary house in New York City, has just released our book Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy.
The book looks at the growth of captive-audience media, the different forms it takes, why its poised to grow so much in the near future, and what the ranks of unhappy captives are doing about it. It ends with a look at ways to create environments in which both willing and unwilling audiences of captive-audience media can happily co-exist.
Ultimately it’s a positive book because it shows that many people are not sitting by idly while media companies blanket our common spaces with media that people can’t get away from. If you are a critic of captive-audience media, I hope you’ll support Algora Publishing and the effort to put captive-audience media in its place by buying the book. As the author, I would appreciate it too.
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TV and education: when 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on July 14th, 2009
If you let your children gnaw on doughnuts and sip sweetened fruit punch when they’re babies, should you be surprised when they have no taste for something as bland as cooked vegetables when they’re old enough for solid food? The cause-and-effect relationship seems about as clear as anything can be.
Yet when it comes to our children’s cognitive development, we seem hell-bent on making it as hard as possible for our children to develop healthy thinking habits even as we worry more about their ability to compete in our increasingly global economy.
First, we rush to sit our children in front of the latest brain development video or TV program and give them all kinds of toys that talk, beep, and whirl.
Then as they get older we let them supplement their TV viewing with video and computer games, activities that, when combined with TV, result in hours spent in front of a screen each day.
Then we let them have a TV in their bedroom and we even buy bedroom furniture designed to showcase today’s hot new flat screens.
Meanwhile, we’re increasingly perplexed, disheartened, and outraged that our children have trouble sitting still, do poorly in school, never read anything on their own, and are overweight.
Our business leaders walk around with the same blinders on. In a business strategy that perfectly leverages our increasingly print-averse society, they rush to blanket our world with out-of-home video screens by introducing screens to buses, trains, subways, street corners, elevators, taxis, building lobbies, waiting rooms, restaurants, and even the classroom. This not only reinforces our screen addiction but creates increasingly hostile conditions for our dwindling population of holdouts, because few things are harder to do than to read and think in an environment dominated by the visual and audio noise of TV.
Then, when our latest crop of graduates have neither the reading skills nor the math skills to compete with the more educated and disciplined graduates in other countries, our business leaders march up to Capitol Hill in Washington and talk about our failing schools.
Clearly the problem lies with the recalcitrant and inflexible unions that represent our $35,000-a-year teachers, say the $1 million-a-year CEOs, with the $2-million-a-year legal counsel sitting behind them.
Our business leaders want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to build their business by filling as many nooks and crannies of our world outside the home with video screens, reinforcing the screen habit and making it increasingly difficult for the hold-outs to read and think, and then they want to put the burden of reform on the schools that are given the impossible task of teaching screen addicts to read, write, and calculate with numbers.
That’s an equation that doesn’t add up.
On noise, a judge who gets it
Posted by R. Freedman in Media noise on July 12th, 2009
For anyone interested in noise issues, the scenario is depressingly familiar: a bunch of guys whooping it up late into the night, their music blaring, never giving the neighbors a moment’s thought. One of their neighbors finally decides he’s had enough and calls the police. The party-makers retaliate by damaging the neighbor’s fence and dousing the front steps with motor oil, trying to set it ablaze.
It’s a typical formula: selfish noisemaking, exasperated neighbors, stupid retaliation.
But in this case, in Eau Claire, Wis., the outcome takes a surprising—and satisfying—twist. The noisemakers are caught, charged, and convicted, and the judge sentences the chief perpetrator to four months in jail, two years of probation, and forced abstinence from alcohol. He’s also prohibited from having any contact with the neighbor and slapped with a $2,269 fine.
Finally, a judge that gets it. “The intimidation of the victims is the aspect of this that bothers me the most,” the judge said. “There was retaliation here.”
For anti-noise activists, it seems like each day selfish people are given yet another way to impose themselves on others. If’s it’s not ultra-powerful stereos in their cars it’s ultra powerful stereos in their homes. If it’s not TV in their backyards its custom pipes on their motorcycles. Thanks to our consumer culture, the innovators whose ideas line our store shelves are tripping over themselves to get a market edge by giving us the loudest this, the most aggressive that. It’s all about the consumer and selfishness. What that eventually translates into is a sense that it’s all about us and any attempt to make us consider other people is an infringement on our freedom. After all, if we’re not supposed to impose our noise on others, why are we given these products?
This is ludicrous, of course. Freedom isn’t about being able to do whatever you want; it’s about self-governance. License is the idea that we can do whatever we want. Self-governance is the idea that we are each our own sovereign, and thus not only are we each entitled to respect but we also owe respect to one another. To impose your noise on others is to act as if you’re somehow more sovereign than others.
What’s so heartening about the outcome in this case is that the judge sees clearly that license is getting out of control, and what’s needed is a renewed focus on self-governance. Tomorrow there will be another case in which one person imposes himself on another, but today at least we can take satisfaction that not every selfish person rules the day.
Serenos = serene: a definition mayors should know
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on July 10th, 2009
Imagine if your city had public servants with police-like authority walking neighborhood beats but unlike their law-enforcement colleagues, these public servants weren’t focused on the punitive—catching evildoers, so to speak—but lending a hand, greeting visitors, sweeping up litter, and maintaining the quiet.
Something I didn’t know until yesterday is that this type of public servant was common in Spain not too long ago. They were called serenos, and their primary function was to ensure everything was nice and peaceful at night: the gas lamps lit, travelers safely settled in an inn, unnecessary noise tamped down. I guess “sereno” equaled “serene.”
It’s a lovely concept and it’s a shame we don’t have anything quite like this in the United States. I know of at least one exception. In Washington, D.C., there are beat-walking public servants called ambassadors in the downtown area whose job is very much like that of a sereno: they help lost tourists before swindlers do; they keep a broom handy to sweep up litter; and they call on the police when they come across trouble. I think they’re also on the lookout for suspicious activity; as far as I know they didn’t exist before 9-11.
I mention the idea of serenos because it’s a program an anti-noise activist would like to see adopted in his city and others. It certainly makes sense.
“They would have the ability to stop cars [disturbing the peace with ultra-loud stereos] and cite them, or call for a tow truck if a repeat offense,” the activist says in a letter. “They would take their own initiative when hearing music harmfully blasting from a house or building, to warn the inhabitant, and if a repeat offense then seize stereo equipment . . . They would guard our streets and the peace of our streets. They would establish community relations and awareness and education in their dealings with the public.”
All well and good, municipal lawmakers might say, but unrealistic: no budget. We can’t all be like Washington, D.C. That city has resources available to it from the federal government that we can’t match. Besides, we already have our police department. How can we justify a whole new resource drain when we’re struggling to maintain something as core as our police?
Good arguments, to be sure, but anti-noise advocates have good arguments on their side too. For one thing, The Washington, D.C., program is funded by the private sector. Downtown businesses voluntarily pay into a fund, and it’s that fund that pays for the city’s “serenos,” not the city general fund. I don’t know all the details, but I expect the city pays into the fund, too. It’s a joint venture. But what it shows is that the private sector recognizes the need for the kind of municipal stewardship the serenos provide.
Nor is it redundant of the police department. Although in the ideal the police prevent problems, the reality is that they largely respond to problems. They’re too stretched to do much beyond dealing with problems as they’re happening or after they occur. Troops of beat-walkers that help head off trouble would give police breathing room to be more than responders. And in any case, when was the last time you saw a police officer pull a whisk broom out of his holster?
Serenos are just the thing for municipalities to help keep the peace. If that idea came across my desk as mayor, I’d be on the phone in a second calling local businesses to get their support for funding a serenos corps and then I’d go to the city council and offer them a deal they can’t refuse. Wouldn’t you? Maybe the anti-noise activist’s letter will make some headway.
Stabbing Over Loud Music Reveals Cultural Rift
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on July 9th, 2009
A loud-music tussle that ended in a stabbing death a few weeks ago in Cincinnati has spawned a lot of commentary and soul-searching among commentators about the state of humanity, but arguments over noise that turn violent are dog-bites-man stories.
All you have to do is search “conflicts over noise” or some variant of that on Google and you’ll get story after story of people turning violent, including murderously violent, over music and other noise.
What’s striking is that, in almost all cases, it’s not the person who’s perturbed over the noise that becomes violent; it’s the person making the noise that does.
It’s the business of social scientists to look into why this is so, and I’m sure many already have. But one thing I know is that, at least in the case of boom cars, playing one’s music loud is largely about one thing, and one thing only: thumbing your nose at other people.
A study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice several years back, when boom cars were first becoming a menace, concluded that the culture’s anti-social aspects aren’t a side effect of boom cars but a core value of it.
“Playing car stereos loudly can be an act of social defiance by some . . . an important part of their cultural identity and lifestyle,” the report says. “It is not easy to change the behavior of those who see loud car stereos as an important part of their lifestyle.”
Anyone who’s confronted a boomer already knows this, of course. Noise Free America, a nonprofit advocacy organization, maintains a database of car stereo ads that are celebrations of anti-social behavior. The ads joke about playing your music so loud that older people go into cardiac arrest. Or they joke about flipping people off when they complain about your music.
This is toxic stuff.
To be sure, car stereo companies have cooled it in recent years. One of their trade groups, the Mobile Enhancement Retailers Association, came out with a policy a few years ago discouraging that kind of thing among its members. Although I haven’t looked into it, I suspect most have in fact moved away from overt appeals to people’s baser instincts. But why was it ever allowed to get to this point in the first place?
We live on a small planet that’s getting smaller. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman puts it, our planet is hot, flat, and crowded. He’s talking about our relationship to the environment, not to our “soundscape.” But the two go hand in hand. Our soundscape is just as much a part of our environment as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the resources we consume. People either act as stewards of our environment or as users of it. When you play your music so loud that you impose yourself on others, you’re using our soundscape. What we need is a consensus that we should acts as stewards of our soundscape. It’s only when we reach that consensus that the violence will stop.
Force-fed media leave us naked in the surf
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on July 8th, 2009
Thomas Friedman in a New York Times column several weeks ago bemoans the sorry state of American education by referring to a Warren Buffet quip that only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.
In Friedman’s take, the tide has gone out and the United States is now exposed as naked economically because of the poor job we’ve done raising our educational standards. After leading the world in the quality of education in the 1950s through the 1970s (and charting our biggest economic gains at the same time through real, rather than paper, growth), we’ve fallen further behind the rest of the developed world. The only thing that’s maintained the illusion of continued American strength are bubbles.
He quotes a McKinsey assessment that the U.S. economy would have grown larger by up to $2.3 trillion in 2008 had the country closed the education gap between itself and high-achieving countries like Finland and South Korea.
To be sure, there are plenty of thoughtful people who insist the United States doesn’t need to generate top-class academic achievers to compete globally because of other factors working in our favor: business-favorable laws, a still-strong university system, a well-developed system for allocating capital, and our entrepreneurial culture, among other things.
It’s hard not to agree that the U.S. continues to have a lot working in its favor, but Friedman’s point is that we’re living on borrowed time; we capitalized on our advantages so well after World War II that we put ourselves into an unassailable economic position and we’ve been coasting on that legacy ever since. But now the tide is going out and we have no more bubbles to cover up our nakedness. The rest of the world is catching up and is indeed poised to surpass us because while our kids are playing video games, watching YouTube, and listening to their iPods, the kids in other developed countries are succeeding in schools that actually challenge them.
Clearly, kids are kids the world over, and a 19-year-old in South Korea is just as likely to spend his downtime watching YouTube and listening to his iPod as an American kid. But there’s no contesting the fact that, at least for a large chunk of the student population in the U.S., mastery of math and the other basics has taken a backseat to electronic distractions. It’s hard to concentrate on math problems or text on a static sheet of paper when you’ve grown up having devices constantly buzzing, ringing, and flashing light at you. Is it any wonder that a 14-year-old today finds school irrelevant? The world has been completely transformed in the last 20 years thanks to the Internet and other innovations in communications technology, yet schools remain organized the same as they were 100 years ago. They still teach as if the classroom remains the principal door to knowledge for children.
The move toward captive-audience media in this country makes the educational challenge that much more difficult to meet because it reinforces the message that schools, with its legacy of text-based learning, is irrelevant. How can a teacher press her students to concentrate on a static sheet of text or math problems when everything in the world outside the classroom is moving in the direction of not just audio-visual communication but force-fed audio-visual communication?
With force-fed communication, the message comes to the audience, whether the audience wants it or not. If I’m sitting on a bus, the TV playing overhead forces its content onto me, and my only option is to try to block it out. If we multiply these types of captive-audience environments to include the many places we conduct the business of our lives–trains, airports, elevators, street corners, gas stations, restaurants, gyms–we become conditioned to having information pressed on us.
That’s very different than having to get the information ourselves. With print-based media, it’s up to the reader to extract the information out of a text. A page of text can’t be forced onto me like a minute’s worth of video content. With video, I can sit back passively and let the content come to me. With print, I have to go to the content and extract meaning from it.
When you consider the information environment in which our kids today have grown up, it’s no mystery why schools are struggling in their educational mission. Even the best teachers are challenged to make reading and math exciting when your students have grown up in a world expecting information to come to them.
There’s much to support Friedman’s contention that education in this country is in a hole, and business leaders should be concerned about that if they’re not already. But the next time you hear business leaders bemoaning the substandard reading and math skills of new graduates who apply for jobs with their companies, you might first want to see if their business model is contributing to the problem. If their business supports or profits by captive-audience media — i.e., they advertise on captive-audience media platforms or they’re in the business of delivering information to people in captive-audience settings — then they are signaling to children that it’s okay to sit back and wait for information to come to them. Indeed, everything about audience captivity reinforces passivity in people.
It’s fair to say, then, that we have seen the enemy and it is us.
