From CM Tue Oct 31 09:08:47 2000 X-Sieve: cmu-sieve 2.0 Return-Path: <CM> Received: from laexchange.101comm.com ([209.134.33.74]) \tby barnard.utulsa.edu (8.11.1/8.11.0) with ESMTP id e9VEXt425644 \tfor <jared-housh@utulsa.edu>; Tue, 31 Oct 2000 08:33:55 -0600 Received: by laexchange.101comm.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) \tid <VJPJDVJB>; Tue, 31 Oct 2000 06:30:18 -0800 Message-ID: <A163123ACF66D3118DFB00508B2C8173A7CC61@laexchange.101comm.com> From: CM <CM> To: "'jared-housh@utulsa.edu'" <jared-housh@utulsa.edu> Subject: Headspace Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2000 06:30:10 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; \tcharset="iso-8859-1" [ The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set. ] [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set. ] [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ] I thought it's my duty as a professional media whatever to comment on the media saturation thing. The danger of media saturation, from my point of view, is that with the abundance of media people, will become increasingly pedantic, focusing their attention to a single interest or pet cause. Even though I work for a magazine and about half of my coworkers have formal journalism training, I am the only person I know that faithfully reads the newspaper every day - every one else I know seems to turn to the Web or television for news, if they even care about "general assignment" reporting at all. With the narrowcasting of the web in particular, it seems very easy for people to zoom in on, say, sports, to the exclusion of all other information. It seems like twenty or thirty years ago, if you wanted in depth information about sports, you would pick up a daily paper and read the sports section, but you would be much more inclined to dawdle on the front page or the business section than today, when you would just go to another sports site. I'm not picking on sports - people with an interest in computers or business are equally guilty. I'm sure you know people whose media diet consist exclusively of computer information. This is proabably just human nature - I mean, if you go to New York (or even a mall) and you walk around, if you're say interested in buying records and chinese food the thing you notice are record stores and chinese restaurants - women's club gear stores are pretty uninteresting and you don't have the context to appreciate women's club gear. In my class on Rhetoric, Orality and Video, the professor called this phenomenon a "surplus of texts;" if you walk around New York, there's too much information jumping at you to understand it all. (Conversely, why do art museums and galleries have plain white walls?) Probably the most pernicious effect of media saturation is in political reporting - I have to believe that the way politics is reported in this country and the constant erosion of citizen interest is a vicious cycle. People are becoming less and less interested in politics, so political reporting is becoming more and more targeted toward people with intense interests in politics - the news focuses on Gore or Bush's strategies for winning, rather than the issues they intend to addess as leader, so people tune out and become even less interested in politics, which reduces the incentive for the media to report in a way that is meaningful to audience who want to make informed voting decisions, not get the low down on a candidate's political tactics. That said, the Knicks home opener is tonight! Go Sprewell! >"Grabasses bad!" Is that a Mr. Bachman reference? Yer friend, C