Smitten with Screens

In Watching Books, an Authors Guild Bulletin article published last summer, I wrote

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium.

As I'm not a social scientist, these observations were not supported by hard research or statistics. Thanks to Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University writing in the New York Times, they are now powerfully reinforced by metrics supplied by such solid data gathering organizations as Nielsen and ComScore.

Surprisingly, Stross focuses not so much on the Internet as on television. You'd think that TV, like print media, would be losing ground to YouTube and other Web distractions (nearly 100 million viewers watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos in December alone!). In fact, watching television in the third quarter of 2008 increased by five hours a month compared to the same period in 2007. "Tellingly," says Stross, "YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership - it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen."

In short, whether it's YouTube or BoobTube, "A tipping point has been passed in the competition between print and screen that has been under way since the beginning of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media."

Stross's conclusion: "People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention."

In Watching Books, I wrote,

The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand. Books are vehicles for ideas; one can set a book down and ruminate and process. Computer monitors, television sets, and e-book screens discourage reflection. Thinkers simply live in a different time zone from watchers.

Stross echoes my own disheartening comments: "We used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience, too, but 'immersive' now seems shorthand for 'video on a screen.'"

"Smitten with screens" is his phrase for it, and I can't think of a better one. Read Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens in full and - if you can spare a little time between your TV programs and your Internet videos - reflect.

Richard Curtis