America’s Weight Problem

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving and you’ve probably had too much to eat. It won’t be much longer before it’s time to make New Year’s resolutions and many will again make losing some of those extra holiday pounds their goal in 2019.

But, that’s not the “weight” problem I want to address today.

Actually, it’s America’s WAIT problem.

Everyone’s in a Hurry

I guess one of the benefits about being retired is that it gives you a chance to hit the pause button on your life and bear witness to everyone else around you. Unfortunately, what I’m seeing is a world where everyone’s in a big rush to get somewhere. On the highways, traveling the speed limit, makes one feel like a road obstruction.

My GPS

Once upon a time, I used to push the speed limit. I even had a radar detector on my dashboard. But all that darn thing did was make me anxious. It gave off lots of false alarms and I finally got rid of it. No one seemed to get pulled over for going 5-miles over the speed limit, I thought, so who needs a radar detector anyway.

Then I got a GPS. I quickly learned that going 5-miles under the speed limit got me to my destination about the same time and I could drive all the way using cruise control, hardly ever touching the gas or brake. Driving everywhere has become such a pleasure.

Maybe everyone should have a GPS to show them slowing down is a positive, and makes our highways a safer place for everyone.

Skip Button

America’s wait problem extends to so many places.

Disney offers a fast pass at their parks to allow patrons to get into their favorite attractions faster. Supermarkets offer self-checkouts or carts with handheld scanners to allow their customers to get in and out of their markets quicker.

Sheetz (a gas/convenience store chain in our area) sent me a post card asking if I’d like to download their App because, as they put it “lines are overwaited.”

Pandora, Apple and Spotify offer listeners a “skip button” to bypass songs they don’t want to hear, and allow them to get to the next song faster. They all seem to limit this feature to about six songs an hour and users think this limit is too low from what I’m reading.

Short Attention Spans

Short attention spans seem to be affecting everyone these days. It’s probably the underlying cause of “America’s Wait Problem.”

Technology Enables Wait Problems

I remember having a six-transistor radio as a youth. It had two dials on it, one for volume and the other to change the AM frequency the unit could receive. Our television set at that time was connected to two antennas on top of our house, one for the NBC TV station and the other for the CBS TV station in our area. If you wanted to change TV stations, you got off the couch to turn the dial.

Then, radios got presets for the growing number of AM and FM stations that were on the air, and television sets got remote controls and became connected to a cable that offered a myriad of TV channels.

Today, the NFL offers a channel that keeps switching to every scoring drive around the league.

If you didn’t have a short attention span as a child, you’re acquiring it as an adult in today’s media world.

Why Most Songs are 3 to 5 Minutes Long

The first records were 78s. They were called that, because the discs spun around at 78 revolutions per minute. The 10-inch 78s could hold about 3-minutes’ worth of music and the 12-inch 78s could hold about 4-minutes.

In 1949, RCA introduced the 45-rpm discs with those huge holes in the middle. Like the 78s, these new records also could only hold about 3 to 4-minutes’ worth of music.

In spite of the fact that as technology took away such time constraints, artists knew if they wanted radio airplay, they had to keep their songs in that 3 to 5 minute zone.

Oh sure, there were exceptions; “Hey Jude” by the Beatles and “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris come to mind. Back in the day many DJs called them bathroom break songs.

Some radio operators in Canada and Australia tried cutting song lengths in half, saying it was because their “listeners attention spans suck.” A format called “QuickHitz” launched in the USA in 2012 and limited the length of every hit song played to just 2-minutes. John Sakamoto, a staff reporter for Canada’s STAR newspaper wrote: “Once you get over the initial outrage, it actually makes perfect sense. Our attention spans are short, four minutes seems like an eternity, therefore something designed to capture our attention — say, a pop song — should be twice as good at half the length.”

SPOILER ALERT: That Calgary radio station John wrote about quickly abandoned the format calling it an “interesting experiment.” You can read the rest of the story HERE.

Wait a Minute

And there, in essence, is our problem as a society today. We can’t wait. Not even a minute.

We want it, when we want it, on the device we want it on, and we want complete control over it, once we have it.

This is the 21^st Century media challenge for all of us.