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Urp! Step back from the media buffet

We're consuming such a vast quantity of movies, television, blogs - and fresh refills from YouTube and Netflix - that we may wonder, are we fed up?

By RACHEL ABRAMOWITZ, Los Angeles Times
Published March 18, 2007

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

Americans need to go on a diet. A media diet.

The average American spends 9.6 hours a day inhaling media - watching television, using computers, listening to the radio, going to the movies, and reading books and newspapers, according to the Census Bureau's new 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States.

As a nation, we spend on average two months of every year watching TV. Perhaps it's not crazy given that, according to the 2006 International Television and Video Almanac, we have 392 cable channels to choose from and 40,000 DVD titles. And let's not forget the 175,000 books published annually, or the hundreds of movies released each year and the billions of Internet pages.

Still we want more. According to the census data, America's per capita pop culture consumption is expected to increase from 3,333 hours a year in 2000 to 3,518 hours in 2007. As Brian Graden, president of entertainment for the MTV Networks Music Group, says, "The more media that's consumed, the more it drives overall usage. It's like an echo chamber effect."

Twenty years ago, people worried about the New Yorkers stacking up in their bathrooms, but now there's also 100 hours of TV stacked up in their TiVo and a long line of desired videos in the Netflix queue as well.

Contemplating this media overload, media consumers and social scientists ask: Is the glut of entertainment polarizing our country, killing our attention spans and turning us into a nation of fickle dilettantes? How do people cope with the techno-world of infinite choice, particularly those who need to keep ahead of the curve?

Staying on the edge

Roy Lee, known as Hollywood's go-to guy for the latest sensation from Asia, manages to keep current by giving up sleep. He's down to a mere three to four hours a night.

The producer of The Grudge and The Departed, Lee, 37, watches a movie every night from 10 to midnight as he works out on the elliptical trainer, then spends the next three hours online trolling through Web sites, reading entertainment blogs or searching cinema sites for hints of what's cool in Seoul, Hong Kong and Taipei, Taiwan.

For books and music, Lee relies on Amazon.com's list of top sellers. The only medium that flummoxes him is TV - "I feel overwhelmed by the amount of TV. I try to limit myself to one show that I watch."

DreamWorks chief executive Stacey Snider, who's renowned among intimates for having seemingly read every book possible and seen every cool movie worth seeing, says she winnows her choices by relying on recommendations from friends and acquaintances.

"It's a group of people - they turn me on to stuff and I turn them on to stuff. We know our tastes are comparable," she says.

Snider admits she'd rather stay home and watch "some weird movie" than go out to dinner.

"I've always been a homebody that way. I was that way when I was single, so I can't lay it on my kids."

Managing media

Media glut becomes more manageable if one filters the information or deletes whole categories of options.

Some folks of a certain age probably don't do YouTube. Don't game. Don't practice quasi-entertainment options such as instant messaging or texting.

Producer Michael London admits: "I've always been a media junkie. I've always been vulnerable to disappearing down the rabbit hole. When the rabbit hole has gotten bigger and deeper through the Internet, for people like me who multitask, it's created a real danger. It creates a perfect meltdown scenario to people who are vulnerable to trying to do too much at once. You can sit in your office, and you can be having a phone conversation while reading Variety online, and answering your e-mail, and having an IM chat with somebody. It sounds crazy, but it's not an exaggeration."

Ever hear a suspicious pause at the other end of the phone? As if whomever you're talking to just missed what you said?

"The thing that suffers," London says, "is your focus and your creativity. It limits the time you have for sitting and watching a movie, or reading a script, or thinking about an idea. The things that suffer and get thrown away are the things that require the most sustained thought."

That's why London has been "trying in my own humble way to disconnect a little bit. You have to force yourself to go cold turkey. I literally tried to listen through an entire album a couple of weeks ago, to try to get back to that space where you listen to things as a whole instead of just sample. We live in a culture where everyone is sampling."

E-nough, some say

London, having produced such cool indie gems as Sideways and Thirteen, is on the cutting edge of another emerging trend - what professor Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California calls the "e-nuff already" phenomenon.

Cole, the director of the Annenberg School for Communication's Center for the Digital Future, has been conducting a long-term study on the effects of Internet use and computers on families.

Surveying 2,000 households for the last six years, the researchers discovered that some of the "most advanced users of technology were saying, 'I'm tired of always being tethered to other people. Before I go to sleep I have to answer all my e-mail.' It's really a function of being overwhelmed by the amount of things technology makes available."

The e-nuff-already types are "mostly people who've been online six years or more. The real e-nuff-already people - the most extreme are the ones with BlackBerrys - but everybody feels the pangs. There's just too darn much.

"People talk about wanting choice, but they don't want too much choice," says Cole. "That comes out of psychology. In 1975, when there were in most markets seven TV stations, 90 percent of the viewing was on three channels - the three networks. Twenty years later, most people had well over 100 channels, but 90 percent of the viewing was on seven channels. You give people more choice, and they don't use that much more of it. On the Internet, 90 percent of Internet use is on 15 Web sites."

Too many choices

Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice who specializes in psychology and economics, goes even further: "When you give people too many options and too many variables, it paralyzes them and they end up choosing none, or if they do choose, they end up dissatisfied with their choice because they're sure they could have done better with all those options.

Given the chance, people will choose lots of options and then suffer for it."

Schwartz thinks that the abundance of choice leads to a certain polarization in American society.

"What worries me about the media explosion is it's killing any common culture because no two people experience the same stuff at the same time. No one is ever forced to encounter an idea they disagree with. Some people watch O'Reilly. Some watch The Daily Show. Both represent the pure view. All you do is talk to people who agree with you. That's not good for democracy."

Trend spotter Marian Salzman, the chief marketing officer for New York ad agency JWT Worldwide and co-author of Next Now: Trends for the Future (with Ira Matathia, Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95, 320 pages), says that the media glut is making people "emotionally overloaded. There are too many things pulling on our heartstrings, and we're becoming emotionally desensitized. People cease choosing and become superficial grazers."

Filters on the rise

Despite the all-out cultural bombardment, no one suggests that Americans want to revert to a cultural dictatorship or to the pastoral media climate of the 1950s.

"What everybody wants is control," says Cole. "They want to know the good stuff."

What appears to be rising are lists, filters or any handy-dandy system to cut through the dross.

Larry Gross, director of USC's Annenberg School of Communication, says that for the last 60 years, since the advent of TV, "research showed the key ingredient in media influence is other people. The term 'opinion leader' came into use. It refers to people who on the whole pay attention to the media and who to a large extent are influencing their friends."

In other words, most people didn't rely on the media directly but on chosen intermediaries who deciphered it all for them.

Today, those intermediaries are often not human, as many of the big online retailers have adopted the Big Brother tactic of tracking each consumer's buying patterns and making recommendations based on what similar buyers already bought.

After an online search inside the book Electronics for Dummies, Amazon breezily recommended checking out Robot Builder's Bonanza. Not bad. Still, it's creepy knowing how much personal information is being stored by corporate America.

For those who actually make the media that's consumed, all this choice can be a good thing - in that it keeps creators from getting lazy.

"Our ability to sell junk is diminishing," says movie producer Nathan Kahane (Stranger Than Fiction, The Grudge).

"Up until the last 24 months, you could market almost anything and make it look slick. They seem to be smelling rats more these days. The information spreads through the blogosphere and MySpace. That's the best thing in the world for the movie business. Any time a businessman has to take a look at their product and make it better in order to have consumers means the product is going to get better."

That said, choice makes life a lot more stressful for content providers.

"I don't feel at all overwhelmed," says Kahane, 34, who has a 4-month-old and is spending more time at home, where his wife controls the clicker.

"I feel overwhelmed as someone who claims to be creating entertainment to have a renewed sense of the massively changing tastes and how different younger people want to be entertained. Where are they going to take entertainment over the next 10 to 15 years? I think the truthful answer is we have no idea."

9.6 - Hours per day the average American consumes TV, books, radio and other media

3,518 - Hours per year of pop culture consumption in 2007

185 - Increase in hours of consumption since 2000

392 - Number of cable channels available in the U.S.

7 - Number of TV channels that draw 90 percent of viewership

[Last modified March 15, 2007, 10:33:04]