Synthesis Essay for ENG101

It is interesting to think about how television could possibly affect your attention span. In Postman's “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985), he states a particular fact that “the average length of a shot on network television is 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see.” This fact alone shows that your attention is constantly shifting and changing focus to see what else is there or what is coming next. With the coming of the internet age, written narrative is coming closer and closer to its end. As mentioned in Paul Grabowicz's article “The Transition to Digital Journalism”, “Younger people in particular are said to lack the attention span for reading in-depth stories and are supposedly turned off by long and complex narratives.” This being supported by a study performed in 2008, had shown that people actually yearn for in-depth, intellectual stories, yet cannot seem to get into them. Such overtures of todays generation is the product of what author Neil Postman (1985) as well as CNBC's Co-Creator and Executive Producer of “The Squawk Box” and “Squawk on the Street”, Matt Quayle, say is from television being the medium. In Quayle's 2010 article “The Method of the Medium is in Motion”, he goes on to say multiple times that he does not want to undermine what Postman's 1985 book says. He, in fact, goes on to say how ahead of it's time it was and that in many aspects how much of what he says has come to be true. However, Quayle also states that, being twenty-five years later, it is time to reevaluate what Postman said. It is time to show that although at one end of the spectrum Postman was right, on the other hand, there is a whole opposing side of the spectrum where television is an important news medium. Quayle (2010) references how in 1984 Postman's selection choice for examples was far to small and “premature” to accurately measure the potential of the medium. As a matter of fact, with how interactive television has become today