The Fault Lies Not in the Goldfish, but in Ourselves.

As a creative person and a copywriter, I have a terrible belief. 

Unlike so many clients and so many of my colleagues, I don't blame people for their short attention spans. I don't blame people for not reading. I don't blame people for not caring. 

I blame us.

Not to terribly long ago I read this book: "The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction." 

The book covers a period known to people even more esoteric than I, called Late Antiquity, roughly between 300AD and 900AD. That's so long ago, they didn't even have bagel Wednesdays or casual Fridays. 

Back in those days a lot of people were seeking connection with their god through contemplation. Interruption was dangerous; it kept them from the divine. It didn't merely keep them from buying your client's brand of mayonnaise, it kept them from salvation and potentially dropped them instead in a burning lake or perdition.

Your timesheets are late

.

Monks worked hard at learning to concentrate, to banish thoughts of all things unholy, even food and cleanliness, from their daily lives.

Concentration = salvation.

In other words, attention spans were not just a matter for powerpoint proclamations and ad agencies. Attention spans were a matter of (eternal) life and death.

The elite (in the Late Antiquity, holy people) have always decried humanity's susceptibility to distraction. In monkish parlance, "Habent operam spatium hippurus." People have the attention span of a goldfish.

Today, it seems that every commercial I see, no matter where I see it, seeks to overcome mankind's purportedly recently-arrived attention deficit disorder by having the VO shout at people, by employing asinine stuntification, or via a too-hot mix and a music track that tries to ear-inveigle its way into your frontal lobes.

WE HAVE TO SHOUT AND PANDER TO THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR BECAUSE OF THE FAULT TO OUR AUDIENCE WHO HAVE NO ATTENTION SPANS!!!!!

No one says,

IT'S OUR JOB TO DO SOMETHING INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT ENOUGH SO THAT PEOPLE WANT TO PAY ATTENTION.

So no one is kind to the viewer anymore. No one gives them something interesting to look at, savor, enjoy, learn from.

Our job can be simply described.

It's to create lust for things people very often don't think about. They don't have time to think about. Or they don't know why they should think about.

Our job is to find things that make things--even seemingly unimportant things--interesting. It's the same job a movie director has. Or a painter. Or a war correspondent. 

It's not the thing. It's how you tell the thing.

Robert Capa, maybe the most-noted war correspondent ever once said, "if you're pictures aren't good enough, get closer."

He never said, "Jeez. This is such a boring war."

He got closer.

Consider that creative direction.

What follows are not too long to read:

Everyone's heard the story before. 

How do you find a different way to tell it?

When John Kennedy was assassinated, there was, as you might expect, a lot of coverage. Every creditable newspaper covered it. Every news magazine. Every television network. 

Here's a brief synopsis of what New York Herald Tribune writer, Jimmy Breslin did to get people to read him, not anyone else. Update Breslin by 60 years, this is what he did to get clicks. Or eyeballs. Or to combat "goldfish attention-spans."

It's not the thing. It's how you tell the thing.

He thinked.

He angled.

He was interesting.