YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (07-20-23)

 

     If you want to know how short our attention spans have become, just turn on the game. Short of actually begging us individually to keep watching and not turn our eyes away for ANY reason, the producers of live sporting events are trying everything in the book. No one has the attention span to actually read a book, so they're trying stuff that they think might be in a book.

     I was watching the baseball all-star game last week, and it used to be enough just to watch the best players in the game play the game. Not anymore. We need to listen to them play the game also, and so they are "mic'd up." The broadcast booth was carrying on a running conversation with the pitcher in between pitches, which was constantly interrupted by a rude batter swinging and missing THREE TIMES while he was trying to talk. The most interesting player on the field this year is Japanese, and I was dying to see if they would let his interpreter "mic up" next to him on the pitching mound. "Shohei Ohtani wishes to thank Baseball for this opportunity, and I think I heard him mention how underpaid interpreters are."

     The producers kept passing the microphone along, trying to find someone on the field who might have the personality to take our minds off this boring game. Someone who's been practicing his stand-up while sitting on the bench. "I tell you, Jim, I just love playing here in Seattle- playing anywhere else is like a day with sunshine, ha ha ha." "Ha ha. Speaking of light, it's time for a word from our sponsor, the light beer company."

     You need to get your product to appeal to EVERYBODY. But in trying to include one group, you'll undoubtedly offend another. You'll have to handicap which minority is the one unlikely to notice that you threw them under the bus, but what if that was precisely the corner of the market that you are trying to capture? Once you have everyone under the bus, maybe you can run an ad under there that appeals to them while your core fans aren't paying attention. That's what we've been reduced to: pandering to the least tolerant. 

     In case you were thinking of running to the bathroom during the commercial, or getting something to eat, the ad now runs simultaneously to the side of the action on the field in the dreaded "2-box." Now not only is our attention span short, but divided with one eye trained on the commercial and the other on the field. It's just a matter of time before they start running two commercials at the same time with the game in the background. It also explains why I'm so hungry at the end of the game and my bladder is not in a forgiving mood.

     When they do cut away for commercial, it's for a movie about a superhero who is an insect, and there is a lot of stuff blowing up and a parallel universe and defending civilization, and in the midst of all the explosions nobody thinks to whack him with a newspaper. Luckily there is no shortage of bugs to make superhero movies about, and if you come to my patio you can take some with you to your parallel universe, or even your perpendicular universe on the off-chance that one of them may be a superhero. When we come back to the game, who is sitting in the first row box but the superhero bug-guy, eating something- whatever it is it's attracting bugs.

     It's now more important than ever to build personalities that transcend the game because their stories are so uplifting. If you were born without the use of your eyebrows, and you came from a broken family and were adopted by a different broken family who beat you every day at Scrabble and then had a troubled marriage during which you transitioned into a woman but didn't like it so you transitioned back again, THAT'S what we're looking for. If you overcame all that to hit .188, it's the feel-good story of the year.

     When did we as a society become this vapid? Can you imagine what it took to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel without posting updates on how it was coming along or crowd-sourcing suggestions? "OMG Mr. Angelo, that is a GR8 picture. IMHO you could include IDK maybe a devil emoji in that garden, FWIW? If not NBD. LMK." What was the invention that started us off on an inexorable journey that drove us to where we are now, where there is always something better than what we are currently doing? Was it the telephone? Was it the automobile? Was it the remote control? I'll delve into this subject in depth when I have a few seconds. Maybe we could spend a little more time spending time instead of wasting it. NGL but TBH YOLO. TTYL.