One of the worst things about today’s ultramodern systems of
communication is hiding in plain sight: They waste our time.
Sure, gizmos like computers and cell phones and pagers can be real
time-savers. But what’s less obvious is the great extent to which high
tech keeps us waiting.
Whether you’re rich, poor or somewhere in between, time probably
seems to be in short supply. And when intrusions keep draining away
precious moments, you probably feel some combination of annoyance,
frustration and anger.
The overwhelming nationwide response to the new do-not-call
registry is a form of national rebellion against corporate
time-stealers. “We need to appreciate the magnitude of what has
happened,” writes Fortune magazine senior editor Geoffrey Colvin.
“America’s stampede to zap telemarketers is a true grassroots movement,
and a huge one. It shows how extraordinarily deep and intense people’s
feelings are about this seemingly minor issue.”
During a two-month period over the summer, upwards of 40 million
people in the United States signed up to declare their home phone
numbers off-limits to the marketing juggernaut. But the do-not-call
list speaks to merely one manifestation of an ongoing assault on our
time. While a current TV ad blitz by a credit-card company is warning
against “identity theft,” we have yet to see a national campaign
against a much bigger problem -- time theft.
In ways large and small, our time is being nickeled and dimed by
corporate interests and government agencies that view it as worthless.
Consider how much time you’ve spent this year running gauntlets of
phone carousels and waiting on hold while muzak and sales pitches fill
your ear. It’s remarkable how often there’s “unusually heavy call
volume” -- a double-talk phrase that could be translated as “your time
is far less important than our overhead.”
And more companies are using voice-recognition software to force
callers to talk to machines. Those firms aren’t paying us, so our time
isn’t worth anything to them. Better we should wait longer.
Increasingly, while callers are compelled to hang on, recorded
messages are pitching products and services at captive ears. By any
other name, this is another form of telemarketing.
Meanwhile, more traditional advertising on radio and television
continues to waste our time while media companies are selling our
ear-and-eyeball time to advertisers.
The Internet experience is also, more and more, an assault on our
time -- and not only with the escalating barrages of spam from
e-marketers. Just clicking through the pop-up ads on Web sites can be a
real time drain.
The do-not-call upsurge is a barometer of how compacted our lives
have become. The media environment, broadly defined, is constantly
polluted with hollow claims on our time and attention.
Overall, the social fixations on commerce -- the structural raison
d’etre of most media institutions -- relentlessly nibble away at our
time. To the extent that it doesn’t seem to belong to us, time comes to
seem more like the property of unaccountable institutions and their
functionaries.
Today, the media establishment routinely fails to cover the siege
against our time as a huge quality-of-life concern. These are important
issues. For instance: How much of your time gets squandered in traffic
for lack of adequate mass transit? How much time have you spent this
year waiting in line at an understaffed post office (while the Pentagon
budget continues to spike upward)? How many government agencies and
corporate firms keep you waiting “due to unusually heavy call volume”
that isn’t unusual at all?
While people in various economic strata are apt to feel an acute
shortage of time, those with money are able to buy some time in
numerous contexts. The affluent, and even more so the rich, are able to
“buy pass” major inconveniences, like waiting for buses or doing
tedious errands and tasks that people of modest means do for
themselves.
As it happens, journalism is one of the many professions with
often-unrelenting time pressures. That’s true now more than ever -- and
even long ago, the news business was notably frenetic. Before he died
in 1926, the American educator Charles W. Eliot told a newspaper
reporter: “You are in the worst job in the world. You never have time.”
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Norman Solomon’s weekly syndicated column is archived at
www.fair.org/media-beat.
