The Tribal Mind: Slow life in the fast lane

October 30th, 2007 · No Comments

This is the land of the short attention span. When it comes to entertaining themselves, Australians want it all and they want it now. Cinema and television were never going to be enough. We had to have videos, then DVDs, then Pay TV, then the internet, then iPods, then stuff we could watch on our mobile phones.Somehow mainstream television managed to survive this accumulation of new distractions, with audiences dropping by less than two per cent a year over this decade. That was until 2007, when the networks finally decided they had a problem that needed to be fixed. They gave their solution a name which sounds perfectly suited to the land of the short attention span: fast-tracking. But so far, fast-tracking seems to be slowing down the recovery of mainstream TV. (more…)