A two-year-old
child can be a real handful if he's trying to get your attention.
Young toddlers quickly learn that outlandish behavior (like
cranking up the volume on the TV or dropping food on the
floor when they feel left out of dinner conversation) draws
the notice of their parents. Luckily, little kids grow up
and learn there's a difference between good attention and
bad attention.
Too bad many in American media haven't learned that distinction.
Instead, they do whatever they can to get us to pay attention.
They shock us, titillate us, scare us, disgust us, and deceive
us. Why? The same reason two-year-olds do it: attention
often yields rewards.
Increasingly in our culture, media producers, advertisers,
and publicists see little distinction between good attention
and bad attention. In a media-saturated age that gives us
thousands of choices for entertainment and products, just
getting noticed is the most important step in finding an
audience or a customer base. Take the now infamous Janet
Jackson Super Bowl halftime incident, for instance. I recently
read an article in AdAge magazine in which PR firms praised
Jackson's exposure on live national television. According
to them, Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," three
weeks before the release of her new album, was the perfect
way to raise brand awareness in the general public. The
fact that Jackson's name broke Internet search engine records
seems to confirm this take on her flagrant violation of
television decency standards.
What's so revealing about the Super Bowl incident has nothing
to do with Jackson's breast-baring costume and everything
to do with our reaction to it. Cynically, the stunt seemed
designed to be controversial and divisive - and the media
frenzy surrounding the event convinced many that they had
to have an opinion about Janet Jackson. Everyone was talking
about Janet Jackson. And so all of us played right into
the hands of an often-used media formula for grabbing the
public's attention, making her the household name on the
eve of her new product launch.
To a certain extent, we can't help it. Our brains are designed
to react to jolts and surprises. The media understand this.
That's why there's so much sex and violence on TV. When
we are jolted into paying attention, we stick around to
see what will happen next, and if we keep being jolted and
tricked, we'll sit on the couch for a long time. But let's
be clear about this - the media-makers who use this strategy
aren't appealing to what we are most interested in. They're
just using a psychological trick to get us to pay attention.
Many of us, I suspect, couldn't care less about Janet Jackson,
but we've been tricked into thinking that her halftime stunt
is particularly interesting. We're giving her bad attention,
because, well, we can't really help it.
Smart parents soon learn not to reward their toddlers' behaviors
that prompt the wrong kind of attention. Maybe it's time
we taught the media the same lesson.
David Walsh, Ph.D. is the founder of the
MediaWise Movement, a program of the National Institute
on Media and the Family (www.mediafamily.org).
His next book, Why Do They Act That Way? A Survival Guide
to the Adolescent Brain for You and Your Teen will be
released this summer.
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