The Spectre of Headline Culture

THE SPECTRE OF

HEADLINE CULTURE

“I'm not telling lies, Main hoon Banda very nice Frank-kaly main toh bolu jo pasand hai, pasand, only Chicken fried rice.”

Take it from that perpetual indicator of Indian culture, the evergreen and always relevant Baba Sehgal, that all is not well on the scene.

Recently, caving under pressure from all the 18-yr old producers around, Baba made a tall commitment, to produce One Song Every Day.

This brilliant strategic move comes from an astute observation of the culture machine.

We are slaves to the meme, the quick half-life and quicker decay of our stimuli and the daily changeover of our icons.

Why invest in great production when you’re headed for the trashcan anyway?

Media is the churning cultural turbine of our times, and it’s turbulence is felt everywhere.

Todays Viral hit is tomorrow’s Cultural Debris.

A recent study by Microsoft found that the average adult smartphone user has an attention span of approximately 8 seconds, down from 12 seconds in the year 2000.

Interestingly, this is a whole second less than the proverbial Goldfish.

The short attention spans create a endless provocation based media culture, where overly sensationalist writing creates what are called “Curiosity gaps” in the target audience. Audiences then fill up carefully planted “pockets” in headlines with the most shockinducing fillers from the debris of their own minds.

The culture of summing up nuances and analysis for a lowest common denominator creates Headline culture.

Headlines were meant to progress viewers to the article, not necessarily to sum up the entire indepth content in a sentence, which in turn creates massive generation losses.

It’s like making sense of your entire world view through a series of elevator pitches. What kind of a world view would that be?

“Click-baiting�, a sort-of derogatory term, applies to blogs that use sensational headlines to lure eyeballs, usually at the expense of quality and accuracy.

Scarily enough, a recent study showed 8 of 10 people only read headlines on blogs. A relentless media culture of this kind eventually creates a large un-informed audience, armed with the false notion that they are fully aware.

We are now Armchair warriors with half knowledge, re-tweeting half-sensations, following half-causes, and liking half-truths.

A generation defined by the knee jerk impulse.

The rigour of understanding is no longer necessary.

The culture of mediocre engagement creates scary trickle down effects. The hyperactive media landscape becomes the mental environment we inhabit, and it’s only a matter of time before this becomes indistinguishable from our built environment.

A media culture that espouses a culture of provocation eventually spills over into the streets as design and architecture.

Architecture is suddenly loaded with the added responsibility of having to shout out amongst the din.

The grammar of the media experience is now readily readable in emerging architectural form.

When Sensation drives the creation of the Headline, there are certain principles at play.

THE HEADLINE

CULTURE PLAYBOOK

rule#1 Industry experts recommend the content to pose a threat, to make readers feel imminently at risk.

The fake sense of danger draws people to read the rest of the article like no other. ( For Ex. 8 Lies about Sunscreen – ignore at your own risk! )

THE HEADLINE

CULTURE PLAYBOOK

rule#2 Tight headlines, or “no-flab” sentences communicate the intent of the article in increasingly compact ways.

Our twitter-trained minds then fill in the gaps so we can skim through content at lightning speeds. ( For Ex. Lose 8kgs in 16 days! )

THE HEADLINE

CULTURE PLAYBOOK

rule#3 Create a sense of missing out, of loss, where the reader is left with an incomplete sense of being left behind.

The rush to catch up with the speedy current of culture makes them read these articles. ( For Ex. Will these women change the way you dance? )

Headlines are offering us quicker, faster, simpler hacks to live our lives.

As our attention spans shorten and the marketplace becomes more crowded, headlines will say more ludicrous things, more half-truths than ever before, to compete for valuable time.

What is very clear is the ever-widening gulf between the Headline and the Content.

The Headline is outward facing, marketing it’s insides.

It says anything that will pull crowds in. It markets the news, it is not burdened with authenticity or accurate representation.

The metaphors for design and architecture are more than obvious. Our current fascination with Faรงade architecture follows the same principle.

The internal workings of buildings are increasingly divorced from their facades, and the gulf is only widening.

Jazzy marketing headlines of sales brochures increasingly define what goes onto the outward facing public face of the building.

Earlier ideas of the plan being the generator, the building’s public response being a simpler, more honest indication of it’s workings gets replaced by this divorce in narrative.

The Façade now over-compensates, screams out intent, wraps itself in a media shroud, and proclaims iconic supremacy over the unending landscape of surrounding icons.

The functionality of the Inside is framed on the grounds of economy and minimum ‘wasted’ circulation space.

These usually consist of open floor plates that are as blank as possible, sometimes designed by a completely different department, or even a completely different company.

How schizophrenic is it to divorce the front from the insides of a building?

The insides speak of economy, the outsides scream to the street.

Only the evening light displays the nakedness to the outside.

We are suckers for imagery.

Decaying old mascots tell us how we should live.

New “smart” cities shame older “dumb” cities.

There is no room for the Wise.

Is that blindingly bright beam shining across the tower in the images actually going to installed, or is it the over-active imagination of the rendering agency?

Are those lush trees at the base of the building really going to be planted, and are the paanwaala and auto-repair shop going to be relocated?

Is the view from the upstairs window really a 270 degree sea-view or ( with a slight tilt-down ) the wastelands of the most marginalised parts of the city’s urban plan?

Our Sales imagery robs us of the texture of Life.

As soon as sales images start dictating design, we succumb to the headline culture that the media environment washes over us.

Any avant-garde movement in architecture and design over-compensates, the need to shock and provoke overrides any other concerns of sustainability & context.

We are Nothing without Context.

As in a well crafted Novel, after the beginning sets the stage, the context establishes the players. Fleshed out characters root themselves in it’s world.

Our Design and Architecture paradigms need the twin agencies of Time and Context to create a coherent story.

By planning our exit from the sensation driven headline culture, and moving into a more languid, nuanced and magical re-telling of the same story, we will start to ask the right questions.

How does the built form change over time? How can we ensure it ages gracefully? How does it respond to the hottest day, the wettest week, and the evening sunset? How does it speak to the pedestrian on the street?

What do you want to look out at when you wake up in the morning? How can the structure actually inspire a more social, connected way of living? Can a daily magical ritual emerge, at the end of each line, paragraph and chapter?

Can the layouts of apartments inspire interaction the way some well-designed Hostels work? Can children learn and play in improved common spaces? Can we trade manicured golf courses for lush edible forests or vibrant festival grounds? Can privatised spaces offer anything better to the public domain than high compound walls?

The nature of questions one asks when writing a 850 page novel about food, and the depth of inquiry while writing a 850 word article about the same for a tabloid is fundamentally different.

One glosses over the surface, one dives deep.

One aims only to impress, the other aims to educate.

One shrinks your mind, the other expands it.