INTERVIEW: Christine Rosen on National Public Radio
Christine Rosen of The New Atlantis discusses ways the remote control, TiVo and iPod have revolutionized consumers' habits
By Christine Rosen
Posted: Sunday, January 23, 2005

INTERVIEW
National Public Radio  
Publication Date:

LIANE HANSEN, host:   The New Atlantis bills itself as a journal of technology and society. On the masthead, it explains that the title comes from a fable written by Francis Bacon about not only the benefits of science and technology but the social, moral and political difficulties that may come with it. In the current issue, there's an essay with the headline: TiVo, iPod, and the Age of Egocasting. Its author is senior editor Christine Rosen, who's in the studio.

Welcome.

Ms. CHRISTINE ROSEN (Senior Editor, The New Atlantis): Thank you for having me.

HANSEN: In your essay, you discuss a number of modern devices, and you state while they give us the illusion of perfect control, that these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste but the numbing repetition of fetish. And the first gadget that you mention is the remote control which, of course, allows us to change channels without leaving the comfort of our couch, but why is this more than just a convenience?

Ms. ROSEN: Well, I think we become so enthusiastic about the technologies that we forget to ask what it is that they're making more convenient. So with the remote control, for example, what did the remote control make more convenient? Well, television watching, and if you have any sort of concern about television and how much people are watching television these days, then you might be concerned about something like the remote control and its later incarnations, things that allowed us to shift, to graze. `Grazing' is the term that we often hear used within the communications industry itself in the '80s and '90s largely by, ironically enough, television executives, who started to notice that they were having trouble keeping viewers' attentions during programs. Why? Well, because the remote control made it very easy to flip around and wait until something caught your eye, something dramatic. As a result, we actually saw television programming change because of the remote control.

So, for example, when you're surfing through the television, you see that little icon of NBC or CBS or ABC on the, you know, bottom right-hand corner of your screen. That's one of the techniques that the networks have used to try to brand that network on your mind even though you're surfing around. You see hot switching, which is moving straight from one program directly into another without commercial, very lavish opening sequences, for example, to grab the viewers' attention and keep them there so they don't pick up that remote and start grazing for other options. So a number of things--actually, the remote control, which started as a convenience, changed the way television was made.

HANSEN: Another device that you talk about--I mean, it started out with the video cassette recorder, which allowed us to tape the programs that we liked and then we could watch them at another time and we tended to accumulate, you know, these--pile of tapes that we were going to watch. Now we have digital video recorders like TiVo. How is that changing our TV viewing habits? In other words, do those people who have these DVRs no longer graze? Were the DVRs designed to kind of halt that practice?

Ms. ROSEN: Well, this is the really remarkable thing about these DVRs. The one thing the digital video recorder users do is they--something like 92 to 93 percent of them skip all commercials, which makes sense. They don't want to watch the commercials. Two interesting points on that. Advertising research suggests that you don't actually have to watch the commercial in real time and listen to the sound in order to absorb the marketing message. You can fast forward and see that Big Mac zooming in and, boy, you still think, `Hmm, Big Mac.' Your brain registers that. The other point is that since digital video recorders have become more prominent, we've seen more insidious forms of advertising. We've seen the proliferation of product placement on television, too, on game shows; on, you know, "American Idol, there are always Coca-Cola cups sitting on the--these things are a reaction by the networks and the advertisers to the fact that consumers are trying to escape commercials.

HANSEN: There tends to be almost like a cult of TiVo...

Ms. ROSEN: Yeah.

HANSEN: ...that it's this, you know, god we've set up on a pedestal somewhere. I mean, I think in your article you quoted people saying, "TiVo is god," or, "TiVo"--I mean, you know, you pry it out of my cold dead...

Ms. ROSEN: My cold dead hands.

HANSEN: ...hands. Right.

Ms. ROSEN: Right.

HANSEN: You know, I mean, they're zealous about this. Does this surprise you?

Ms. ROSEN: It doesn't because what TiVo is tapping into and all the digital vide recorders are tapping into is the absolutely intoxicating feeling of control that people wish to have. I mean, the FCC commissioner, Michael Powell, referred to is as God's machine, but the interesting thing, I think, is that, unlike a gatekeeping technology--for example, like Caller ID; you can see who's calling and check out who it is and decide whether or not to answer the phone. Unlike those gatekeeping technologies, this puts all the power in your hands, and so we are joking that, you know, nobody ever calls Caller ID Jehovah's secretary, but you call TiVo God's machine. So there's this unlimited sense of power and choice and control which, of course, it does have, but the question I think we should be asking about these technologies is: What other kinds of things are they encouraging?

HANSEN: So what's the downside of this control of our viewing habits? I mean, really, what's wrong with having control?

Ms. ROSEN: I think the main problem with TiVo in particular is that the control we are exercising gives us a feeling and a sense that we're also controlling our viewing habits. But the early research suggests that we are not doing that. We are actually going to watch more television if we think we are in control of the television. And this is particularly dangerous for children. We're hearing and reading more about research into how the developing young brain reacts to television and to the images and to the--it activates orienting responses in your brain that do have a long-term effect on your intellectual development. So I think--if it encourages more television viewing, I think that's detrimental for a lot of reasons, not that television is evil and we should, you know, throw out our TV sets, but just that there are a lot of other things we could be doing with our time and spending time with our families. And if we're all so stressed and time crunched as we all claim to be, maybe watching more TV isn't the best way to spend our time.

HANSEN: Let's talk about the iPod. Now this is a digital outgrowth of the old Sony Walkman, and the Walkman allowed people to listen to music at any time they wanted, at any place they wanted. Lots of people made mixed tapes of, you know, their favorite recordings. And with the iPod, you can basically do the same thing except you can have a lot more music, and you can download, like, individual selections. You don't have to go out and buy a whole album and then pick the ones that you like. Again, people are having absolute control over the content of their music. What's the downside?

Ms. ROSEN: With iPod, there are two downsides. One is that it encourages a sampling approach to music. Just as you suggested and described, you can just pick here and there. You can hear Mahler's greatest hits. You don't have to sit through the whole symphony. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that unless it makes us lazy listeners and unless it--in the desire to constantly be hearing something fresh and new, we lose the patience that's often required to really listen and appreciate music. I also think, in terms of how people use their iPods, which is walking around on the street with the headphones in their ears, like cell phones, it is not a good thing for the use of public space. And I think it allows people to just tune everything out and just walk along the street, listening to their life soundtrack, which is great for them, but not so great for civic sensibilities.

HANSEN: What do you mean when you write that these devices do not encourage the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish? Is this the idea that we're just going to what we like?

Ms. ROSEN: Exactly. The art, literature and music is supposed to transform us. It's supposed to take us beyond what we think we know and what we think we feel and what we think we believe. If we're choosing only the things that already endorse what we believe, how are we going to have the possibility of discovering new things? And that's why I think a lot of these things encourage fetish rather than truly critical appreciation because they don't challenge us.

HANSEN: Do you see iPod white headphones coming out of the ears and certain listening going on to the rest of the world?

Ms. ROSEN: Yes. Actually there was a wonderful piece in The New York Observer by one of their reporters, who had become an iPod addict. He said there he was, sitting on the subway, rocking out to his iPod, which is, of course, the image of iPod--the lone, solitary individual rocking out to his headphones--and he realized he missed his stop. And he paused and he thought, `What am I doing? I live in one of the most amazing cities in the world, and I'm not experiencing it because I'm too busy listening to Donna Summer on the headphones,' or something. So I think, yeah, there are some people who are going to be able to just take those headphones out and hang up their cell phones and listen to the world around them, engage the world around them.

HANSEN: Christine Rosen is the senior editor of The New Atlantis. Her essay, "The Age of Egocasting," appears in the current issue.

Thanks so much for coming in.

Ms. ROSEN: Thank you.

Related Links
The Age of Egocasting
Fast-Forward to Passivity
Our Cell Phones, Ourselves
The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society