Abstract of Christie's Thesis

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Fast Forward: The Dehumanizing Emphasis on Linear Time
in the North American Television System

ABSTRACT
We feel rushed. A third of North Americans report “always feeling rushed,” despite having gained five hours per week of free time since 1965. In an effort to examine one of the roots of this common experience, this thesis explores the influence of television on shaping the North American experience of time.

Since almost its inception, television has been funded by commercials. As a result, its form and format have developed in a context of needing to hold the audience’s attention to be sold to advertisers. The best advertising context is one in which the viewers long for a better future, and believe that such a future is based solely on their action, thus making them susceptible to the promises of advertising. Thus the structure of the television system has developed to intentionally create a momentum that holds viewers in linear time, speeding with no restraint toward a desired future.

This emphasis on linear time is the result of intrinsic structures that serve to hold audience attention. Formal features are used to cultivate the viewers’ orienting reflex, a natural human response to quick-changing stimuli of sight or sound. Editing and pacing practices are used to increase the density of the televisual experience, so as to manipulate the viewers’ subjective sense of time. Practices of format, such as accelerated flow as a scheduling device, the placement of increasingly mature content later in the day, and the strategic use of live programming all contribute to a momentum that holds viewers in linear time. Particular examples of these strategies are also explored, including the deliberate use of news programming, and the visual, textual, and density design of commercials.

This sense of linear time, being structurally embedded in one of our most compelling technologies, is having a dehumanizing influence on our society. In linear time the future is always new and thus unknown, thereby forcing us to move faster, to arrive in the future first in order to capture for ourselves any limited resources. The result is a culture of speed that dehumanizes us by encouraging us to treat ourselves, each other, and creation as mere tools for progress.

An alternative is possible, however, in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Its concept of time is linear—aware of cumulative movement in a direction—but its momentum is restrained by the cyclical intervention of the Sabbath. The Sabbath regularly reaffirms that linear time is bounded by the creating and redeeming work of God. This affirmation allows us to slow down and live within the healthy, life-affirming boundaries of being human.

As an interdisciplinary thesis, sources are drawn from a variety of fields of study. The chapters on technology and television practices are informed by dozens of media researchers in disciplines as diverse as communications, psychology, journalism, sociology, advertising, and education. An understanding of the Judeo-Christian concept of time is drawn from sources in the fields of history, philosophy, and biblical and spiritual theology.