The Crawl

Here we are, five years after the most significant attack on American soil in the modern era (the Japanese attack on the Aleutian Islands in June 1942 was important in that it might have diverted enough Japanese aircraft carriers to tip the scales in our favor in the Battle of Midway). I remember September 11th, 2001, as a day of sorrow, confusion, and misinformation (bomb at the State Department, evacuation of Stuyvesant High School) for much of the day. After we were allowed to leave work I ended up at a candlelit vigil, and then joined my sister at her apartment to watch what felt like endless amounts of television. I was therefore introduced to a seemingly minor shift in cable news programming: widespread use of "the crawl."

A crawl is a moving line of text at the bottom of a screen, that can provide continuous information while allowing pre-recorded or live programming to continue above it. September 11th marked the advent of near-ubiquity for the crawl on television news. Fox, CNN, and then MSNBC added the crawl to their coverage of the terrorist attacks in order to provide emergency information, even offering the crawl during commercials. Before September 11th, the crawl was used mostly in sports and financial news programming, with a notable exception being CNN's Headline News.

I remember sitting there in Cambridge in awe of the events as they unfolded, particularly some of the more outlandish claims moving along the crawl at what might as well have been breakneck speed; we'd see news of a bomb left in a locker in building x or some other development, and then wait for the entire crawl to reach the same point to learn additional information. Often, it was never provided; the story was in fact not true. This was understandable, given the enormity of what transpired in the early hours of September 11th.

What is less forgivable is how the crawl remained after the dust clouds settled. The major cable news channels continued to make use of the crawl, probably in order to keep viewers with ever-diminishing attention spans glued to their stations. (Of course, the crawl was no longer used during commercials, I guess for similar reasons to why volume control devices and TiVo are so vigorously opposed by advertisers.) While our younger generations are known for their ability to multitask and there are even arguments for why an endless stream of blips and bytes might improve certain kinds of intelligence (see Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter"), you have to be disappointed with how shamelessly the crawl has been exploited at times in the last five years. Plenty of what appears in the crawl offers very little in the way of news. For instance, Fox begins its crawl with the current Threat Level (Elevated, as per usual) and more recently has added the Airline Threat Level (Red - drop that Colgate Total right not!) to boot. Plugs for forthcoming broadcasts, the repetition of network slogans, and the like are now juxtaposed with television news captions, stock index windows, clocks, and bizarre elements (such as CNN's "Countdown to the Ceasefire" clock near the close of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon) to create a verbal collage at the bottom of our screens, much of it repeating what we already know or can intuit if given the chance. News events, through the use of innovations such as the crawl, can be fed to us and dropped at ever-increasing frequencies, saturating and abandoning our minds at will. And while we sit there, imagining all of these boxes and lines of text across the screen as a veritable cornucopia of news sources, we forget that they are all controlled by a central authority (a network), which is managing news cycles and choosing how to brand those cycles as a product of one network rather than the others as much as it is reporting current events.

Which brings to mind the most important question regarding the crawl and its effect on society writ large: does it increase the passivity of television viewing? It is well-established that watching television over time will take our brain-wave activity into "alpha level," which Jerry Mander has labeled the mind's "most receptive mode." How does widespread use of the crawl make us, the viewers, more or less passive? Factors cited for why TV makes us more passive include (a) lack of eye movement due to our ability to take in all of the images without much active scanning of a small TV screen; (b) the flickering TV screen itself; and (c) the fact that images on a TV screen appear as a steady stream and cannot be taken out of the stream and contemplated. How do you think the crawl changes this standard critique of television? Particularly given the fact that we watch, on average, 4-5 hours of it per day? (full disclosure: I don't own a television right now, and have to make friends with those who do : )

I don't have the scientific answer to this question. And I do appreciate some attempts on September 11th, 2006 to improve use of the crawl, at least for the minutes following 8:47 a.m. during coverage on the cable news networks. Fox actually deleted the crawl when cutting to the memorial sites, MSNBC, even though it scandalously rebroadcast the Today Show from that fateful day, used the crawl only to indicate that you were watching something they like to call a "Living History Event," while CNN listed the names and home towns of those who died. But as the networks quickly regressed to use of their new toy long before the Today Show would have ended, I had to wonder whether this little stream of words and numbers was one of the little ways in which our lives took a wrong turn on September 11th.

Perhaps some of you were fortunate enough to be watching one of these stations this morning when for a moment the crawl disappeared - these days, I, for one, will take any additional room to breathe that I can get.

Vaya con Dios - brooding presence