Six hours of television a day shortens your life, say superior Aussie researchers. But what about attention spans? Here comes a TV camera, aimed in your direction, and the first question any potential interviewee needs to ask is a simple one. How long have we got? Thirty seconds, 60, even – oh luxury! – a whole two minutes? For time on the air defines almost everything: what can be discussed, what can be explained, what whatever it is means for the future of civilisation.
A quarter of a century ago, a book by Professor Neil Postman caused a media storm. It was called Amusing Ourselves to Death and it argued, with passion, that daily television news was fundamentally "inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action". Decades on, Postman's son, Andrew, looks back in an essay for another book, Future Media, and finds that same inertia proceeding pell-mell. "Now the soundbite is more like a sound nibble – and it's rare, even petulant, to hear someone challenge its insubstantiality."
Arab revolutions arrive via al-Jazeera and Twitter; London street fires are lit by BlackBerrys. Communities that used to eat together and pray together meet only on Facebook. The globe is an instant but also far more ephemeral place.
"What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by" the new technologies of communication, asks Andrew Postman. "Do they free us or imprison us? Do they improve or degrade democracy?" And before we try to call an e-referendum, Amusing Ourselves to Death's strictures on fragmented news without affirmative action are suddenly the foundations of wider, hysterical argument. We lie back before a tsunami of debt, an avalanche of looting, a tidal wave of adjectival disaster. But we are not required to understand what so much scary verbiage means.
Articles on this page range from 600 words to 1200 or so: that is, between five to 10 minutes of broadcasting. They are two or three or four Six O'clock News leads rolled into a single piece. They have at least the capacity to advance facts and theories in a context you can relate to. But they are also incredibly long by broadcasting standards.
The highlight of parliament's week is 30 minutes of questions and name-calling; the newest form of TV news is a minute squeezed in between CSI episodes on Channel 5; Panorama has shrunk to half an hour; C4's riot debate sought "10-second solutions" to civil disorder . The omnipresent peril is the danger of boredom. Don't stop; don't pause; don't let them reach for the remote.
In the days of Weekend World, when Peter Jay had an hour of Sunday lunchtime to turn a topic inside out, the "witnesses" filmed to back the show's varying theses were basically scripted. It was a bit of a fix, but it was at least coherent. It mixed research and opinion in adequate quantities. But today's filmed interviews are different in kind. The camera turns with the explicit aim of extracting a sentence or two that may fit a stitched "package" of reportage. The studio interview, by contrast, is rigidly controlled lest a stray subordinate clause meanders in trailing tedious detail.
Does that make any remote sense in a world of 250 cable channels and theoretically infinite scope for expansion, a world where meaning could be pursued 24 rolling hours a day? Of course not. It's ludicrous. But then as Neil Postman once said to Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline, "We're having an important discussion about culture, Ted, but in 30 seconds we'll have to break for a commercial to sell cars and toothpaste." At which point Koppel grinned. "Actually, Dr Postman," he said, "it's more like 10 seconds."