Don’t Touch That Dial!

A long time ago, if you wanted to catch someone’s attention on a television channel, you’d have an announcer with a deep voice intone (with as much urgency as he could manage) the phrase: “Wait! Don’t touch that dial!” In the same era, most of the news reporting was done in newspapers, which were all limited to dead-tree hardcopy editions (since the Internet was still no more than a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye), and if you wanted to get people to pay attention to a given story, you needed a headline. Not just large type or fancy typeface, since all big stories would have those, but something witty, intriguing, eye-catching, or funny. The sad part is that this long-vanished time was only twenty or so years back, and most of today’s kids have never seen a television with a dial, and have no idea where the expression came from in the first place. The rise of Internet news sources mean that most people do not read hardcopy papers anymore – which may or may not be a bad thing in itself, but is definitely leading to the death of headlines…

Ironically enough, I found the story in The Atlantic Online , where the author was decrying the rise of search-engine oriented reporting, which includes headlines that are search-engine friendly. When you’re searching for news online you’re only going to read articles that your search engine pulls up, and those will be based on keywords, not on wordplay. The example given in the linked article was about Conan O’Brien refusing to take a later time slot in order to return Jay Leno to the 11:35 pm Tonight Show. The hard-copy headline was “Better Never Than Late,” which is at least moderately funny; the online version of the story was headlined “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno...”

The question raised by the article (and by several of the experts who were interviewed for it) is whether or not this is a good thing. On the one hand, you can’t look for information online by searching for puns or clever wordplay; there will never be any consensus opinion about what is funny, or even what constitutes a “good” pun in the first place, and humor is both culture- and language-specific. Supposedly, some of the funniest jokes in the history of Mankind have been created in Finland, but since they don’t translate well (and not that many people speak Finnish), none of the rest of them will ever get to hear them.

On the other hand, even if humor would translate to the Internet, you still can’t use it to search for data, exactly because the artfully written headline doesn’t contain enough information. If there are millions of online references to Conan O’Brien on any given day (and there are, especially during times like the Jay Leno replacement controversy) you have to be very precise in your search terms to find anything useful – and you don’t want to hear about the problems that a colleague of mine who researches teen pregnancy prevention programs has in trying to get relevant information off of the Internet…

The thing is that while most new technologies must offer some advantage (either practical social, medical, economic or all of the above) in order to be adopted in the first place, many of them have a counter-balancing dark side, as well. There’s no way any sane person would want to return to the days of print-only data searches; the library research that would have taken a grad student like me weeks can now be accomplished in minutes without leaving my desk, and the advantages to doctors, bio-medical researchers and related fields have almost certainly saved a few lives just during the time you have been reading this blog post. But just as automobiles lead to air pollution and Freon for air conditioners leads to holes in the ozone layer, the die-off of headlines (and retirement of the people who write them) is inevitably making all of us less literate and less funny…