From Jack Benny to Michael Jackson: Intentional and Casual Media Use

On Thursday nights in the 1980s, as 9:00 approached, folks reminded each other, "It's time for Cheers." In a ritual institutionalized by three decades of hit TV shows, families gathered around the screen to find out how Sam and Diane (or Sam and Rebecca) were getting along.
Up in the high-numbered channels, someone was undermining that ritual. "You'll never look at music the same way again" was their battle cry, but what MTV really changed was the way we look at television. MTV made us experience television the way we experience radio.

Television didn't make radio obsolete, but it forced radio to reinvent its programming. In the 1930s, people listened to radio the way Cheers fans watched television--intentionally. Radio aired programs of music, news, comedy, or drama in fixed time slots, and programs were written to fit those time slots. Audiences tuned in to hear Jack Benny at the same time every week.
Jack Benny made the transition to television just fine, but most radio programs didn't. Television engaged more of the audience's senses; it was hard to do anything else while you were watching TV.
Radio stations saw this disadvantage and flipped it into a unique asset. It's easy to listen to the radio while you're doing something else. Portable radios and car radios became cheap and ubiquitous in the 1950s, and radio stations replaced scripted, drop-everything-and-listen programs with popular songs in no particular order, and DJs who ad-libbed their material. You could turn the radio on and off whenever you felt like it, and never feel like you'd missed anything.

Radio survived--and thrived--alongside television because it transformed the way people use radio, from intentional media use to casual media use.
Intentional media use is a goal in itself: You make a conscious decision to read this book, watch this program, play this game, etc.
By contrast, casual media use is opportunistic: You listen to the radio while you're stuck in traffic, you read a magazine in the doctor's waiting room.
In his December 12 post on Tools of Change, Joe Esposito illustrates how textual media like books and magazines can thrive alongside video, audio, games, and social media. He calls it Interstitial Publishing, and I call it reinventing text for casual media use.
Print publishing involves fixed production costs that preclude publishing text in snippets. Poems, short stories, news articles, and cartoons are aggregated into books or magazines because in print, it's prohibitively expensive to distribute them as onesies and twosies. And aggregating content into larger blocks encourages intentional media use: I bought this whole big book/magazine of text, now I have to make time to read it.
Generations of print writers have learned to tailor their output to the long, seqential formats of books and periodicals, just as radio writers of the 30s wrote scripts to fill 30- or 60-minute blocks. Reinventing text for casual media use means learning to write a new kind of text, optimized for the reader, not the printing press. Sure, some of it will be dull and derivative, like Reader's Digest jokes or One-Minute-Manager aphorisms. But there's no reason it can't become a new art form of miniature masterpieces, like haiku.

The economics of production made print publications bigger, but they kept popular songs short. 78 rpm records, the industry standard for the first half of the 20th Century, held a little over 3 minutes of recorded music, and this remained the norm even when 45 rpm and 33-1/3 rpm discs made longer recordings possible. When pop music became the dominant format in radio, it conditioned us to listen with 3-minute attention span.
MTV did to television what Top 40 did to radio. Instead of expecting specific programs at specific times, we turned on MTV having no idea whether we'd see Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Devo. But whatever was on, we knew it would be awesome.
Even if wasn't so awesome, we knew it would be over in a couple of minutes, replaced by something different and potentially awesomer. "You'll never look at music the same way again" turned out to mean our attention span for television would shrink to about 5 minutes. (MTV can't claim all the credit for this trend. TV remote control, like power windows on cars, evolved from a pricey option to standard equipment in the 1980s.) Thus did television move from intentional media use to casual media use.

Intentional use coexists with casual use, even for the same media channel. The New Yorker you browse in the doctor's waiting room is the same one I subscribe to and read cover-to-cover (okay, not the fiction). Interstitial publishing--publishing text for casual use--will find its voice without silencing long-format, sequential publishing.
It took decades for printed works to settle into the conventional templates of novel, short story, essay, etc., and decades more for writers to learn the discipline of writing to fit those templates. But they did learn, and often produced brilliant results.
Give writers a market for casual, interstitial prose (or verse, for that matter), and they'll learn to write it, and write it well. The first generation is already teaching itself by writing blog posts. The truly radical invention of bloggers is a literary form that has no set minimum or maximum length.
Casual-use text will find subscribers and/or advertisers when it's so consistently good that readers log on whenever they have a spare minute. Talented artists and original work will define the brand, but as with MTV, readers will be more loyal to the channel than to any specific artist. The interstitial publisher's motto should be: You never know what you're going to find here, but you can be sure it's going to be awesome.