The New York Times is reporting that CNN has decided to cease use of the Crawl, the scrolling text at the bottom of the TV screen.
I remember the first time I saw the Crawl.
I was returning from an intro biology class at Michigan State University at around 11:15 AM Eastern time. During the class, someone had mentioned something about a bomb going off at the Pentagon. “Big deal,” I thought to myself. Bombs go off all over the world, and the Pentagon is one of the most fortified structures on the planet.
Yet as I walked back to my dorm room, I began to sense that something was very wrong. I checked my cell phone on the walk back to my dorm and saw two missed calls and a voicemail from my father. Clearly, he had called once, hung up and immediately called back again, exhibiting an urgency that is very uncharacteristic of my father. I hastily listened to his voicemail, something about making sure I was alright. “Alright? I’m fine.” Why wouldn’t I be?
I took the elevator up to the fifth floor of the east wing of Akers Hall. I walked through the door from the elevator lobby into the resident hallway. It was normal for my floormates doors’ to be open, with the sound of televisions filling the hallway. Except this time the sound of TVs was different. Louder, no wait, not louder…but synchronized and almost echoing. The identical sounds of a newscast was rising and falling in volume as I walked past open doors. The same newscast was coming from my room, too.
I’m not too sure what happened next. I don’t know if someone was in my room, and if so who it was. But I remember watching TV for hours those next few days. It was gripping. It was frightening. It was a tremendous emotional burden for me. I remember the feeling of exhaustion, not of my physical body, but of my mental state. I wanted to know more, to find out what happened, what was going on and perhaps most pressingly, what was going to happen next. That was the Crawl for me. Every new piece of information seemed to have appeared on the Crawl many minutes before a newscaster started to talk about it. I remember reading the name “Usama bin Laden” well before I had heard it spoken.
It was the beginning of the commodification of news. Everything was a breaking story. And it was! We had heard the names, and the number of planes, and the exact times the buildings tumbled to the ground. Eventually the rate of new information slowed, but the rate of breaking stories put forth by the news networks didn’t. Sure, it was about news, but it was about eyeballs too.
For me, the Crawl represents what I perceive to be a fatal flaw in how an individuals attention is engaged by modern society. It’s data without context. How can I create and formulate an informed decision without the context of the data?
This is something we see all the time in politics. Soundbites are taken out of context and posted across the web and the 24 hour news networks. No context is provided, so the recipient is lead to make a judgment that is based off of limited information.
I just think how effective my recommendations and insights would be if I were given a data set with no context to what the data set was about. Just rows and columns filled with numbers, with no story or understanding as to what I was looking at. Sure, I could pull out some figures and trends. But there would be no way for me to take those figures and trends and weave them into a meaningful context that contributed to the story of where the data set came from.
37signals’ Signal vs. Noise blog wrote a post about the Crawl and how it is an example of trying to underdo your competition. I think there is another point that 37signals founder Jason Fried talks about that applies here too, and that is the idea of how our days are split up into smaller and smaller segments, resulting in work moments instead of work days. In the same way, our attention keeps getting divided into more and more directions, forcing us to “multitask.” We are forced to work on two, three, five things at a time, until we get to the point that everything becomes noise, and we are not thinking in ways that create meaning from the noise any longer. And it’s when we can’t create meaning that we lose value.
I don’t know about you, but I like to go with things that allow me to create value.
