On a lazy Sunday, I’ve been going back through some things on the good ol’ DVR.
One of them is a History Channel documentary about the lost pyramid in Egypt, about five miles outside of Giza. Interesting bit of detective work to piece things together. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about.
The documentary runs about two hours, with commercials. We all know that at least 20 minutes or so are eaten by said commercials. There’s something else that eats a lot of time out of this documentary, too–the utterly ridiculous number of re-hashes done after every commercial break. They’re basically truncated “The story so far” bits. But they seem to be done after every commercial break. That eats at least another 15 minutes.
Add to that the fact that they’re utterly inane–usually reviewing things that were just discussed right before the just ended commercial break–and you have something that frustrates me (and people like me) greatly.
I’ll (grudgingly) accept the fact that people have ridiculously short attention spans these days. I’ll readily accept the fact that people tune in to things at odd times (though not too terribly odd–most shows out there still only start on the half-hour). But I have to wonder if the History Channel should be quite so concerned with those with the goldfish-sized attention spans. After all, we are talking about history and people who can’t retain focus and memory over a commercial break can’t possibly grok the concept of history let alone be all that interested in watching something about history to begin with.
If this were a show targeted at children, maybe I’d be more accepting of the “repeat everything as often as possible” tactic being employed. This documentary is most definitely not targeted at children.
That means either the documentary makers or the network decided that either they didn’t have enough actual content to fill the time or don’t understand that, yes, some of us (those interested in what you’re trying to say, in fact) can remember what we just watched three or four minutes ago. In fact, some of us can even pause our recorded show for a couple of hours and not need to start from the beginning when we come back–even if we’ve been doing other things!
Sad thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this. It isn’t isolated to the History Channel, either. Even worse, it seems to be a growing trend all around.
People’s brains work more like muscles than most realize. If you’re not using it, it goes soft and, eventually stops working all together. This sort of incessant repetition actually encourages people to not retain knowledge from one moment to the next. We are generally lazy creatures, after all, and if we get stuck in the habit of knowing we don’t have to remember things from a few minutes ago because, if they’re important, they’ll be repeated right before we need to know them, we’re not going to bother making an effort to pay attention.
That’s a slippery slope to not paying attention at all, leaving the job of telling us what’s important and what’s not to the person telling us what to do. Or, at least, to lazy thought patterns and a great deal of difficulty having enough in our heads to draw our own conclusions.
Hopefully, this is only a temporary thing and will pass.
I’m not going to hold my breath, though. TV could have been something great for education, but most of that potential has been squandered at this point.
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