ALAN writes:
Speed is a weapon used against the old, the past, the sensible, and the capacity for thought and contemplation. Never has any population been more intoxicated with speed than today’s high-tech generations. Speed is their default frame of mind — speed in automobiles, jets, reading, accelerated learning, fast food joints, high-speed Internet, and high-speed advertising to promote high-speed everything across the board.
Observe in today’s television advertisements (unlike those in the 1950s) the constant movement, gesticulating, optical gimmicks, changing frames, hyper-paced editing; the cool, casual apparel preferred by the young and hip; cool people wearing vapid smiles, high speed animation, relentless agitation, and the frame being split into two or more frames, which means your mind being diced and sliced, which has the effect of making or keeping viewers half-witted, which is part of the deliberate dumbing down of Americans. Did I mention the continuous babbling?
I can remember a time when people were savvy enough to recognize an avalanche like that as a Snow Job. Today their descendants enjoy being snowed under and then wait for more.
In the 1950s, advertisers wanted to get viewers’ undivided attention. I can even remember when TV pitchmen spoke the language carefully, clearly, and in a sensible cadence. Today they want to divide your attention from one second to the next, to shatter it, to minimize your capacity for thought or erase it altogether. You are not permitted even for a few seconds to think about what is being shoved in your eye and ear. You are not permitted to pause, to slow down, to weigh and consider claims, to examine their premises, or worst of all, to identify both the sales pitch itself and the format in which it is presented as a high-tech production in song-and-dance Flim-Flammery. They do not want you to think about any of that because they do not want you to think at all. They hate viewers who think — because they might stop being viewers.
For a perfect example, watch any TV coverage of severe weather warnings. Observe the vaudeville routines: Bright colors, cutting-edge “graphics”, maps constantly changing, zoom-ins and zoom-outs, performers flailing their arms and pointing here and there, frames within the frame to show “action crews” chasing storms AT THIS VERY MOMENT, and young men and especially young women chattering non-stop because they are taught not to allow even two seconds of silence during which viewers might decide that all that hype is a waste of their time and attention.
Frank Sinatra said he could get all the daily news and weather he wanted in five minutes. He regarded anything beyond that as a waste of time and attention. How many people do you know today who would find that standard sensible? (I do, but then I am untrendy and uncool as can be.)
In St. Louis in the 1950s-’60s, we listened to weather reports on television given by Pat Fontaine, Jim Bolen, and Howard Demere, all of whom spoke clearly and concisely, without hype, without theatrics, and without babble. Today we get high-tech, high-speed bombast.
Speed is also a means for severing connections with the past, for promoting the fallacies that whatever is fast is better than anything slow, that whatever is new is better than anything old, and that whoever is young is smarter than anyone old. The lesson of high-speed advertising is that whatever is being pitched today is better than what was pitched last week, and that what is pitched next week will be better than what is pitched today.
If you think that none of that is done by meticulously-engineered design and intent, then you are an Ideal Sucker….oops, I mean Consumer. The only scene they allow you to see for more than two seconds is the phone number they want pigeons to call.
My grandfather (born 1879) and my uncle (born 1900) could abide only a small number of TV shows in the early years of television. I cannot imagine them having the patience to endure much TV advertising even in those years when such advertising was comparatively restrained. If they could see what viewers agree to have shoved at them in today’s TV advertisements, I have no doubt they would conclude that such viewers are either (a) nuts, or (b) putty in the hands of pitchmen.
It must be a hallmark of people who have lost any moral compass to congratulate themselves for going Fast even when they are going nowhere or in circles or to perdition.
