A recent George Will column, “Lost In Electronica,” started me thinking about how often kids says they’re bored. “Are you kidding me,” said in my best Robert DeNiro accent! If anything, I find there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to begin to do all that I want to do.
But, it’s evidently a fact that many in this current generation are often bored, even with all that is available at their fingertips. Of course, every child doesn’t have access to all our current high-tech devices, but most libraries do have computer “labs.” Why is boredom more prevalent today? My first answer is MTV. Yes, MTV, which if you’ve forgotten stands for “Music Television.” When it began, in August of 1981, it ushered in a whole new world of fast-cutting short videos.
Until MTV, most videos that our children saw were in the form of television programs–1/2-hour sitcoms and 1-hour dramas–and movies which were anywhere from about 80 minutes, on the shorter side (usually comedies and animated films), to close to three-hours for the epics (like “Titanic”). MTV changed all that by providing little mini-movies, the length of songs, that were also produced and edited in a brand-new style–fast-cutting imagery in which the camera almost never lingered on one image for long. Continue reading »
