Tim Bauhs watches television more like a traffic cop than a couch potato, often listening to a compact disc and reading a book while using his remote control to flip past channel after channel, seldom pausing.
“We get about 50 channels, and the only time I really ever stop on one for any length of time is when the phone rings or something else distracts me,” said Bauhs, who lives in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.
“Most guys I know in their 20s watch TV this way; it’s just for relaxation, you don’t really want to watch anything. I surf the Internet the same way with my computer. It’s easier to get lost on the Internet and you feel more intelligent surfing there than TV, but really it doesn’t make much difference because it’s all trash anyway.”
Bauhs is a bright, busy young man who works as a college administrator and is attending graduate school. He grew up in a home where TV watching was discouraged and has never really spent much time viewing programs from start to finish as many older people do.
He could be a poster boy for the frenetic TV viewing habits that can drive wives and girlfriends crazy as well as cause parents to fret that the younger generation is losing its attention span.
But Bauhs doesn’t see it that way. He finds TV grazing a natural response to the drivel available on most channels most of the time.
“This isn’t an attention deficit disorder,” he said. “It’s a thirst for more information, more knowledge. I can easily watch three games at the same time and not miss a thing. If you do miss something, you’ll catch the replay.”
Interestingly, many scholars say Bauhs is probably right. Rather than representing a decline in intellectual ability, channel surfing may more properly be seen as an adaptive strategy for coping with the modern world.
“It certainly is a popular theory that TV is destroying young people’s attention span,” said Bernard Beck, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “But I don’t know of any well-designed research to show that is the case.”
Another view, said Beck, is that channel surfing helps people to break out of the linear mode of receiving information represented by reading a book. One man’s shortened attention span may be another’s survival strategy, he said.
More and more, people are called upon to switch their attention among many things in their work, which usually involves sitting in front of a computer screen and interacting with it.
“Humans are very adaptive,” Beck said. “We can transform ourselves into any kind of creature the environment calls for. The person with a limited attention span is also someone who can adapt to a world where business is done on screen and on-line.”
Just as bear and tiger cubs learn survival skills through their play, humans also use recreation to acquire skills helpful in their work, he said. Today’s TV channel surfer may become tomorrow’s quintessential computerized deal-maker.
Not only is there little evidence that channel surfing destroys attention span, but the popular concept of attention span is too fuzzy to mean much to scholars, said Gordon Logan, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“In most studies psychologists do, attention span refers to the amount of information a person absorbs rather than the duration of time spent in the process,” Logan said. “The studies are usually concerned with performance, not with whether someone becomes bored.
“If people were overwhelmed with the information they get from channel surfing, they wouldn’t do it. The person with a TV clicker in his hand, moving through the channels, is happy. When I control the remote, I’m happy, but when my wife does it, she doesn’t do it right for me.
“This is the leading edge of interactive technology.”
Although people in the TV industry are aware of channel surfing, they profess to be unconcerned by it, perhaps because they are unsure what else to do.
“Senior ad agency decision makers are aware of it, but they think its effect on TV commercials is negligible right now, although it has future prospects of becoming more significant,” said Ave Butensky, president of the Television Bureau of Advertising, a trade association for broadcasters.
Counting the clickers
People who click non-stop through an array of TV channels don’t get counted as viewing any one program for ratings purposes, which are what dictate the amount advertisers pay to air commercials.
Anne Elliot, a spokeswoman for Nielsen Media Research, said that a viewer being tracked by Nielsen must watch a program for several minutes without changing channels for it to register in the ratings.
Devices installed by Nielsen to monitor viewer habits could register the many channel changes caused by TV grazing, she said, but that information isn’t part of the general ratings. Clients could pay to get such detailed information, she said.
Oddly, changing from one channel to another often may not result in a viewer’s getting significantly different information.
In his book about the media, “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” (Basic Books), John Allen Paulos noted that when he switches from one network news show to another, he often finds they are reporting on the same story.
Paulos, a mathematics professor at Temple University, calculated that if there are five or six major stories of the day and each station presents them in random order, there is a 63 percent chance that two stations will be running their reports on the same topic at the same time.
But because stations don’t present news stories in random order, the chances of seeing the same story on different channels at the same time is even greater than 63 percent, Paulos wrote.
In a general way, the same notion spills over to most entertainment programs too, said Arno Penzias, vice president for research at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
“In the case of TV sitcoms or adventure shows, you have very little diversity,” said Penzias, a Nobel Prize winner in physics. “There are only so many ways you can have people meeting half-nude in a bathroom making salacious wisecracks, only so many ways to show automobiles chasing each other through cities and only so many ways to photograph a helicopter exploding in mid-air.
“So people who have seen these things several times before will tend to get bored upon seeing them once again and will switch to another channel where other scenes they have seen before are being replayed.”
TV channel grazing is just one aspect of the modern world in which the trend is to offer consumers tremendous choice with very low transaction costs.
“There is a man who now offers customers their choice from among 500 mutual funds,” said Penzias. “You can buy and sell these funds as often as you want, by pushing buttons on a computer. You can get in and out of the market as effortlessly as changing TV channels.”
As long as television continues to offer commodity fare, more people will become bored with it and adopt the surfing approach to their viewing, Penzias predicted.
“Today, with such an abundance of information and people all being so busy, the scarcest thing you’ll find is someone’s full attention,” he said. “That’s what is driving the information industry right now.”
A guy thing
Of course, even a devoted clicker-flipper like Tim Bauhs acknowledges that it isn’t for everyone.
“Women don’t really get into channel surfing like guys do,” he said. “In fact, just about the only time I watch a show clear through is when I’m watching with a woman.”
Another devoted channel flipper, Charley Cook, who shares a Gold Coast apartment with his fiancee, echoes that sentiment. “Among men, only the Amish will watch one show at a time,” he joked.
But his fiancee can’t track shows with Cook’s speed, he said.
“I can tell instantly if I want to see more of a show, and if I don’t, I’ll move on, but she’ll say, `What was that?’ and ask me to flip back,” he said. “Usually I control the remote.”
Claire Laible, Cook’s fiancee, said that when she does have the remote control, she rarely uses it to switch channels during shows she is watching.
When Cook starts flipping from one channel to the next, “it makes me nuts,” she said. “I usually go into the next room and watch a different TV or read a book.”
The growing gap between men and women in TV viewing habits was a major theme used by comedian Rob Becker in his one-man show, “Defending the Caveman.”
Men, Becker contends, are by nature hunters who keenly focus upon one thing at a time. They switch through TV channels seeking that one thing upon which to focus while women are by nature gatherers who want to spend time to take in everything around them.
Man’s appetite for channel surfing is probably limited right now by technology, said Logan, the U. of I. psychologist.
“The company that brings out a set allowing you to watch four channels at once would enjoy brisk sales,” he says, “if only they could sort out the problem of separating the sound from all those channels.”
