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“Attention Deficit News Disorder” at its best on CNBC. Despite the copious amounts of information, does anybody really know what time it is? |
Comments (1)ADHD? Blame ADND:
Attention Deficit News Disorder
By Beth IngallsPublished: August 15, 2010
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It’s been just over a year now since legendary anchorman Walter Cronkite passed, and watching a re-broadcast of his historic coverage of the moon landing in 1969 I found myself blubberingly nostalgic for the technologically uncluttered days of my youth. The simplicity of a man sitting at a desk reporting the news while looking straight into the camera is something we just don’t get anymore. It’s also something, I suspect, many Americans wouldn’t be able to sit still for or even find the least bit entertaining.
If an event of such enormous magnitude as the moon landing took place today, imagine how different the scenario would be.
We’d be on techno overload. The HD, flat-panel display would definitely be on in the living room and, though we might all be gathered together as a family watching, that wouldn’t be enough. Our individual laptops would also be humming away and we’d be updating our Facebook pages, tweeting, texting, and making cell phone calls while uploading photos and videos. We’d be documenting our own experience of watching the event while a handful of generic broadcasters droned away in the background. Even the news reporters themselves would be tweeting and checking incoming email while the cameras rolled!
And that would be perfectly acceptable.
It’s no wonder one in 20 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with ADHD.
I think ADHD might be caused by ADND — Attention Deficit News Disorder. I first came up with this new malady after Cronkite’s death when I paid tribute to him by watching countless reruns of his old broadcasts. The gravity, intellectualism, and stillness of news then is such a sharp contrast to what we’ve become accustomed to.
Over the past 40 years, news coverage has evolved, or devolved, to be unrecognizable from the stark days of Cronkite.
Although we get more stimulation, we probably assimilate far less information. We’re bombarded with swooshing flashes of color and multiple split screens with spinning inserts. Never ending, repetitive news tickers crawl across both the top and bottom of the TV. Station identifiers, accompanied by zooming images and sounds, splash around like miniature explosions.
Digital clocks updated from every time zone, every second, remind us of just how late we are. Ads about upcoming shows featuring miniature holograms interact with each other on the bottom right hand corner, occasionally startling us out of complacency. Full-sized, drag-and-drop displays are manipulated by the anchors themselves as they walk around the set at random times during the show. With 24/7 news, we get it all day and night, but are we even paying attention?
Are we moving so fast that we’ve forgotten how to sit and listen to someone like Walter Cronkite? We’re virtually assaulted with information, but we seem less engaged in the political process and we certainly don’t seem to be any smarter. And even worse than that, we’ve become so very rude.
Take a look at almost any cable news show and you can see how far we’ve fallen. Hosts rant and rave while guests talk over each other in an unintelligible, ADND melee.
And we wonder why children these days aren’t learning simple manners and don’t know how to be quiet and just listen when someone else is talking.
We shake our heads when the loudmouth in the grocery store gabs incessantly into his Bluetooth device with utter disregard for those around him.
We wonder why the person in front of us lets the door slam in our face until we realize he’s texting furiously and has completely no idea what’s going on around him. And we’ve come to think it’s normal. Even worse, we’ve come to accept it.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I really miss the good old days.
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