"Kill the Brain and You Kill the Ghoul”—this is either the worst motto for any teacher to live by or the key to killing zombies according to Night of theLiving Dead, the movie that led us to the Walking Dead.

                  So, this post could be about George Romero setting the arbitrary rules that zombies, when re-animated, must eat people.  In a zombie-reality, zombies may not crave human flesh but merely crave rutabagas.  Our world would not be lessened if our rutabaga supply was depleted by the Meandering Dead.   

                  But that is not the topic of this post.

                  Watching TV it does seem that the idea “Kill the Brain and..Kill the Ghoul” is the choice of a new generation.  Our attention span is getting shorter and TV is helping this.  Binge watching 30-Rock is so easy because each episode is only 21:30 long.  If you watch the show in syndication, almost 30 percent of the time is spent in commercials.  If you enjoyed TheWalking Dead, as all humans should have, we had to spend about 33% of each hour watching commercials.  Why does this matter? Well, everything around is conspiring to make our attention span shorter.

                  God forbid we get emotionally engaged in any TV show.  A commercial break of four minutes will often take our attention away.  God forbid we relax and allow ourselves to be lost in mediated literature.  A commercial break will sweep us to a reality in which we learn that apparently every drug that saves our lives can kill us in twelve other ways.  Or that without hair, we can not find love. 

                  A very smart student recently pointed out to me that our shorter attention span affects us in other ways.  We don’t read the whole article anymore.  We read some of an article, get the gist and use that gist as a basis for our facts.  If we read the whole article, we would get all the details and all the context.   We don’t have time to read the whole article.  Not when we are receiving a Facebook message informing us of that a friend has found an actual use for rutabagas. 

                  According to the first 30 seconds of a news story I saw on Fox News and the first four paragraphs of an article I read in some online newspaper, ISIS is trying to destroy us. (I may have read it somewhere else, like a blog, a facebook post or random ramble or something on my computer)   

                  Seems like ISIS does not need to go to this effort.  We are destroying ourselves just fine.  Uncritical acceptance of all media content as being accurate, equating bloggers with actual journalists, the diminishing population of actual journalists combined with our ever-shorter attention span is destroying our minds, our brains.  And when we destroy our brains, we destroy the ISIS version of ghouls--us.

Catching Up With Change--Part 2

Part 2 of playing catch up with all going on in the media.  It's all about the media which means it's all about us.  We're the end users.  Are we getting any use?

Sometimes television does good.  It doesn't mean all will be happy.  A recent Glee episode included an extended scene dramatizing a shooter in the high school while students and faculty took responsible actions to stay safe.  It turns out in the program that there was no shooter though a gun was discharged on campus.

Those perhaps most qualified to comment on the appropriateness of the show, the people of Sandy Hook, contended that the episode was too soon after the massacre.  Others suggest that the episode keeps the issue front and center.  The show was written before Sandy Hook happened.  The terror was recreated well.  Was it too soon after the massacre or was Fox serving to dramatize the effects of such violence?  I am unqualified to have a conclusion.  Fox did include a vague warning at the beginning of the show that the episode involved school violence.  Glee dealt with a fear we all now share.  Since Columbine there have been 31+ massacres.  Was Glee too soon or too real? Or both?

The ratings for Glee jumped 20% for the episode. However, on April 18, Glee lost in the ratings to a rerun of The Big Bang Theory.  Perhaps the most shocking news is that the five combined networks (apparently there is a CW network that airs various programming) got a combined rating of 9.1.  This means that fewer than one out of ten viewers watched a broadcast network at that time.  This compares to a combined rating of 90 for three broadcast networks a few decades ago.

A recent study found that five million homes have become "zero TV homes."  These homes have no antenna, no cable, satellite or other television program provider.  That is up from two million such homes in 2007.  They watch everything they want to on their computers.  Some folks I spoke to have a large HDTV.  It is hooked up to their computers to watch whatever they want online.

Cable bills are too high.  There is so much available on the internet.  There are many reasons to go to zero-TV.  Perhaps if viewers didn't have to sit through 20 minutes of commercials per hour, they would be more patient?  Perhaps broadcasters (and cable) could air fewer commercials, charge more for each and make just as much money?  

If there were fewer commercials and shorter breaks, I would not be as prone to going to Weather Channel.  I will keep TV in my home for various reasons I have rationalized.  I love watching sports.  I love watching Walking Dead.  HBO does amazing documentaries and PBS has some great shows.  It just ain't worth $100+, as my wife reminds me once a month when the bill comes.

Broadcast TV may be just a memory anyway if Fox goes through with its threat.  And the FCC is aware of this threat and responded publicly.  More about this in part 3 of "What's Changing in the Media?"