Another Interesting Tid-bit from THE TIPPING POINT

Excerpt from The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Chapter Three - The Stickiness Factor

"...Many critics of television, to this day, argue that what's dangerous about TV is that it is addictive, that children and even adults watch it like zombies. According to this view, it is the formal features of television - violence, bright lights, loud and funny noises, quick editing cuts, zooming in and out, exaggerated action, and all the other things we associate with commercial TV - that hold our attention. In other words, we don't have to understand what we are looking at, or absorb what we are seeing, in order to keep watching. That's what many people mean when they say that television ispassive. We watch when we are stimulated by all the whizzes and bangs of the medium. And we look away, or turn the channel, when we are bored.

What the pioneering television researchers of the 1960s and 1970s-in particular,
Daniel Anderson at the University of Massachusetts-began to realize, however, is that this isn't how preschoolers watch TV at all. "The idea was that kids would sit, stare at the screen, and zone out," said Elizabeth Lorch, a psychologist at Amherst College. "But once we began to look carefully at what children were doing, we found out that short looks were actually more common. There was much more variation. Children didn't just sit and stare. They could divide their attention between a couple of different activities. And they wren't being random. There were predictable influences on what made them look back at the screen, and these were not trivial things, not just flash and dash." Lorch, for instance, once reedited an episode of Sesame Street so that certain key scenes of some of the sketches were out of order. If kids were only interested in flash and dash, that shouldn't have made a difference. The show, after all, still had songs and Muppets and bright colors and action and all the things that make Sesame Street so wonderful But it did make a difference. The kids stopped watching. If they couldn't make sense of what they were looking at, they weren't going to look at it."


"...One of the standard myths about children's television, for example, had always been that kids love to watch animals. "The producers would bring in a cat or an anteater or an otter and show it and let it cavort around," Palmer says. "they thought that would be interesting. But our Distracter showed that it was a bomb every time." A huge effort went into a Sesame Street character called the Man from Alphabet, whose specialty was puns. Palmer showed that kids hated him. He was canned. The Distracter showed that no single segment of the Sesame Street format should go beyond four minutes, and that three minutes was probably optimal. He forced the producers to simplify dialogue and abandon certain techniques they had taken from adult television. "We found to our surprise that our preshcool audience didn't like it when the adult cast got into a contentious discussion," he remembers. "they didn't like it when two or three people would be talking at once. That's the producer's natural instinct, to hype a scene by creating confusion. It's supposed to tell you that this is exciting. The fact is that our kids turned away from that kind of situation. Instead of picking up on the signal that something exciting is going on, they picked up on the signal that something confusing is going. And they'd lose interest."