Remote control renaissance

Maybe we don't all have a craving for knowing what happens. Walter Parkes asserts "…[popular film narratives'] entertainment value isn't diminished by knowing what happens next." (If you believe his argument you wouldn't leave the television remote in the hands of Scheherazade's husband.)

Although writing in 1994, Parkes' argument is strikingly similar to Doug Rushkoff's message delivered from the Pop!Tech 2004 podium some ten years later. (You can hear Rushkoff's presentation courtesy of IT Conversations.)

Rushkoff and Parkes agree that storytelling is evolving and that the remote control has not only changed the way in which we watch TV, but the narrative format of the TV programming we watch.

Rushkoff believes we have become addicted to the Aristotelian "male orgasm curve" of storytelling and to the release provided by our endings. Escape from the tension built by the unfolding of a traditional sequential narrative, both Rushkoff and Parkes argue, is provided via the remote control and its ability to randomly access content.

The response Parkes observes has been the development of a new narrative style characterised by multiple storylines and characters. (Steven Johnson provides a much more detailed analysis of the increasing complexity of television programming and eloquently argues in favour of its cognitive demands in a recent New York Times article based on his fourth-coming book.)

As Rushkoff's "screenagers" deconstruct TV with their remotes, the powers that be problematise attention and diagnose deficit. Parkes believes simply that “…we’re developing a different kind of attention.

”No longer are we required to commit "…to a half-hour or hour of concentrated viewing." We can interact by "…sampling bits of information at will." As Rushkoff comments:

…it's about making connections; it's about finding patterns in this mediaspace… It's no longer a beginning, middle and end, it's a series of connections.

What Steven Johnson calls "filling in" and according to Johnson: "The open question posed by these [multi-threaded narrative] sequences is not 'How will this turn out in the end?' The question is 'What's happening right now?'"