Your 38 seconds starts now…
Friends with kids, Seeking a friend at the end of the world, What to do when you’re expecting, the five year engagement, Salmon fishing in the zzzzzzz…there has been a recent slew of these painfully obvious titles and the trend seems to be getting worse.
Have you seen that new film Man on a ledge?
No, what’s it about?
Have we really become so thick we need to be smacked around the face with the written equivalent of a very large blunt instrument?
I understand the marketing logic…if you can describe your film in the title you’ve got a better chance of drawing them in. If you could corner a Hollywood marketing executive and force them to justify these “does what it says on the tin” titles they would simply reply with three words: The Shawshank Redemption.
It is now regarded as one of the all time greats but was virtually ignored on its release purely because of the title. From that moment forth out went subtlety and in came the heavy handed approach. However, I think it might have actually been Snakes On a Plane which is responsible for creating the current trend of descriptive movie titles. But the S.O.A.P title was meant to be a joke. A reference to classic b movie titles like “ I married a monster” and “The Creature from the black lagoon”. It wasn’t meant to be a template for all future films.
The same has happened with Tv programmes…my daughter the teenage nudist, the undateables, what I had for breakfast etc etc. The tv execs claimed it was the digital listings that made them turn titles into mini synopsis. If you can’t hook ‘em in immediately they will most definitely click onto something that does.
Nothing is left to chance anymore. No room for any mental activity. Dumb down everything to the lowest common brain cell. But are we all getting increasingly stupid or are they just treating us as if there’s been a mass devolution of the mind? Why was it ok to have non-descriptive titles in the past and not now?
It would appear that technology might be making idiots of us all. Calculators killed people’s need and ability to perform basic arithmetic. Spellcheck quickly rendered our spelling skills obsolete . Sat Nav is rapidly shrinking the part of the brain that can direct us. The more we let machines do things for us the less capable we are of doing them ourselves. We used to be able to navigate by the stars..now we have an app to do it for us. How often do you see smartphone users wandering around like defective robots, standing on street corners, rotating on the spot and bumping into walls as they stare down to find the way rather than look up.
The other reason everything got slap in your face obvious is that there are so many more things competing for your attention than there used to be. The internet is a big, bad, busy place and we are all being bombarded with so much stuff its difficult to know where to turn. In a world of incessant traffic you can’t afford to be subtle. You will just get lost in the barrage of entertainment on offer. From news to pop vids to movies to utube clips to progs to docs to blogs (yes, I am fully aware I am part of the problem), the amount of stuff being hurled our way with is overwhelming. I call it Death by Content and at times I feel like I am truly drowning in it. And who’s actually got the time to look at all this screen based content that just keeps on coming in a never ending swirl of digital drool?
In some ways these descriptive titles do help you filter through the quagmire quicker but if everything is reduced to neat little catchy soundbites, surely it levels the playing field and we are back to square one?
One solution being adopted by many, including myself, is to simultaneously consume as much as possible in an effort to get through it quicker. Read one thing whilst looking at another whilst listening to something else. But as anyone who has tried to have a conversation with a texter will confirm, people’s ability to multi-task has been greatly exaggerated. You can do multiple things at once but you will do them all slightly worse than if you had done them separately. You will also do them slower so you’re not really even saving any time…you’re just giving less attention to everything.
Due to the insane volume of material being spat at us daily, we are all just trying to get through it as quickly as possible, but is anything actually going in or being remembered? If you ask someone these days if they read/saw something they will invariably tell you “I skimmed it..I started it, I got the gist”.
We have all adopted a policy of zig zag reading, picking up just enough info to move on but its not like we’re ever going to get through it all so why attempt an impossible task in the first place?
I should probably actually stop writing as undoubtedly most of you have already moved on..looking at the analytics for my website I can see that 92% of all viewers look at it for 0-38 seconds which has most definitely passed. The 8% of you possibly still with me might agree 38 seconds isn’t really long enough to consume anything.
At first it was a little demoralising to know the bulk of my viewers weren’t staying long enough to register anything. And then I found it kind of liberating. You really don’t have to fret bout what you are saying as there is a very high chance no-one is reading it anyway. I have recently joined the world of twitter and never has so much been simultanously presented and ignored in the history of communication. Its like being in a room full of coke heads..everyone’s talking but no-one’s listening.
One of the reasons we don’t have time to absorb anyone else’s output is that we are possibly all far too busy with our own..we are inundated with content but our gaze is invariably inward, checking our stats, monitoring our mentions, loving our likes..digital platforms have made us stars of our own shows…it can become compelling, addictive, all-consuming but we must remember to go beyond the confines of our own mini digital universes, to use the phenomenal resource that is the world wide web to expand our knowledge and not just our egos.
The internet has proved that everyone has a point and a perspective and we are all desperate to get them across any way we can but everyone else is too busy doing the same so where does that all leave us? 6 Billion voices all screaming “listen at me!”.
I have even found this need to speak rather than listen has begun to dominate real conversation, not just cyber communication. It used to be the height of bad manners to interrupt someone but now that seems to be par for the course. Why wait for your turn when you can just steam roller over someone else’s chat? It seems to have become strangely acceptable to jump in at any point. Why wait till someone has finished? Its not like anyone’s actually paying attention…we’re all just trying to think of what to say next. Conversation has become strangely competitive. Rather than an exchange of information it seems like we are all in a constant fight for the podium.
The ability to listen seems to be rapidly diminishing along with our other neuro-skills previously mentioned so maybe human mental devolution is really happening. Planet stupid has officially arrived. Chris Morris’s eerily prophetic series Nathan Barley warned us of “The Rise of The Idiots” and it really feels that time is now upon us. We have all become Nathan Barley…now, that’s fucking scary. (see it if you haven’t).
Einstein (great with equations and quotes) described creativity as “intelligence having fun” and with a general drop in the intelligence bit all that’s left is plain dumb fun. And even without the dumbing down its still just humans using their brains to amuse themselves and hopefully others. Maybe, possibly, just a thought, we should all be doing something more constructive with our time…there do appear to be a few things that need dealing with…just this one more blog then I’m done…and you should maybe get on too..stop wasting your time reading what I have to say, but chances are you’ve already gone..my 38 seconds are most definitely up.
..hello? Anybody still there?
Babycakes Romero
