Are media workers driving stakes into their own hearts by embracing shorter and shorter forms of digital storytelling – thereby helping create even shorter attention spans among young audience members?
That’s one of the questions posed by Leo Eaton, the Maryland-based producer of such high-end PBS and BBC documentaries as Michael Wood’s The Story of India, in an informal annual state of the industry letter sent to friends and colleagues Monday.
Eaton generously gave me permission to share what he said with readers of this blog. Here’a a bite that seems especially timely with Ken Burns losing his GM funding last month and PBS Monday night launching We Shall Remain, a five-part series on Native American history, the likes of which, some analysts say, we are not likley to see again.
Here’s some of what Eaton had to say. I think the part about the lack of documentary funding is very troubling, and it comes from someone who lives this reality every day in his work.
No aspect of our vast media landscape contains more information about what we were, who we are and what we can be than documentary films. If they are in danger, then so is our self-knowledge and our ability to imagine a way out of the current mess we are in.
But what a strange year this is turning out to be for all of us dinosaurs who still believe that thought-provoking, high-end documentaries have a place in our new media landscape. Ratings continue to plummet for all broadcast (and most cable) networks; the economy’s grim reaper has already scythed two major projects I was scheduled to produce this year while funders struggling to raise finance on other viable projects shudder and turn ashen-white when describing the wasteland that is current documentary funding. Add to this the explosion of new web-based media produced at a fraction of traditional documentary cost (user-generated content is the latest media buzz-word) and I feel like Miss Prism from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, bemoaning the disappearance of the three-volume novel.
It’s not that I don’t embrace the multi-platform world; I’ve finally learned Final Cut Pro, Eaton Creative has its own YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/eatoncreative) and a series about new technologies that I’ve created with MacNeil/Lehrer productions and Arizona State University is already a World of Warcraft Guild and will be an island on Second Life long before a single HD frame is shot for the TV programs on PBS.
But I do question whether we are breeding an audience incapable of paying attention for more than a few minutes at a time. I recently sat in a darkened movie-theater showing one of the few documentaries to make money on the big screen and saw “digital-natives” in the mostly-young audience busy texting (or perhaps twittering) as the movie played. While neurologists have now proved that multi-tasking means one does a whole lot of things very badly, the flood of new media platforms and technologies encourages an increasingly ADD approach to media consumption.
Like any self-respecting dinosaur, I will struggle to avoid the La Brea tar-pits and continue to make good programs (when I find someone to pay for them), whether they be 90-minute movies, hour-long television documentaries or 5-minute pod casts. Compelling stories, intriguing characters and artful execution are still key, no matter what the length – everything else is just distribution.
– By David Zurawik
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