Revolution by remote

Hate how fragmented this war has felt, a blur of endless, unconnected dispatches from Diwaniyah to Kirkuk? Want something to blame?

Before you point the finger at media conglomerates or 24/7 news or Donald Rumsfeld, pick up that plastic device that turns on your television. In its half-century of existence, the remote control has changed almost everything about television: the way people watch it, the way networks package their shows, the way advertisers make commercials. But rarely has it seen as much action as during the past four weeks.

Millions of viewers, trying to make sense of the war, turned their remotes into appendages, constantly flipping through a succession of cable channels, most of which did not exist during the last Gulf War. “I’m probably going to have to buy extra batteries for my clicker,” says Jon Lorbach, a retired human-relations consultant in Fort Thomas, Ohio, who has surfed among MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and other channels during commercials or when a station started to repeat itself.

Some viewers, like Lorbach, say the effort is necessary to develop an independent understanding of a war that TV usually presents in dozens of scattered pieces culled from hundreds of embedded reporters. Others have become burned out, victims of what a Florida newspaper columnist recently dubbed Gulf War Vicarious Anxiety Syndrome. Primary symptom: “generalized anxiety about war, resulting in incessant channel-flipping.” Secondary symptom: “injury to thumb, caused by trying to repair remote control.”

This syndrome was evident by the fourth day of the war, when ABC’s ratings for the Academy Awards plummeted, thanks in large part to the highest rate of channel-surfing researchers had ever encountered during an Oscars show. The surfing instinct is so ingrained -- the majority of American homes have had remote-controlled televisions since about 1986 -- that it’s easy to overlook its unintended consequences.

Ever notice, for example, that network series rarely have theme songs like in the old days? Thank the remote. Notice that there are no commercials between the end of one network show and the beginning of the next one? Thank the remote. Notice (if you’re old enough) that the commercials themselves are more sophisticated and less annoying than the ones the TV blared in the ‘70s? Thank the remote. Notice those endless headlines crawling across the bottom of your screen? Thank the remote. Notice (ladies) that you can tell a lot about a guy’s control issues by watching an evening of TV with him? Thank the remote.

“For all the whiz-bang predictions of what interactive TV is going to bring ... the most significant technological revolution in TV has by far been the remote TV control,” said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “It made passivity even better.”

The remote’s standing as revolutionary gizmo may be on the verge of diminishing, some experts suggest. Within a few years, tens of millions of Americans are expected to purchase so-called “personal video recorders,” such as TiVo. These digital, hard-drive-storage machines -- their prices falling and their popularity increasing through word-of-mouth -- make it far easier to record programs automatically and replay them almost simultaneously, bypassing commercials. The result: Less boredom, less need to surf.

But that’s tomorrow. Today, with war news streaming in, and with three-quarters of the country able to order digital cable and its hundreds of channels, there is no way to schedule your programming. You simply dive in, start clicking and say thanks, sarcastically or otherwise, to Robert Adler, who at 89 is still accepting compliments.

Adler was a physicist at Chicago-based Zenith Radio Corp. in the 1950s. Zenith’s founder and chairman, E.F. McDonald Jr., was convinced commercials would destroy television. He ordered his engineers to develop a device that would remotely mute the set so he and like-minded viewers could bypass ads.

The remote past

The technology that’s let you surf through this war was rooted in another one, World War I, when Germany used radio signals to guide a motorboat packed with explosives. Zenith offered the first TV remote, in 1950, but with a cable from the control to the set. It took five years for the company to introduce the first wireless remote, featuring a ray-gun-shaped control that emitted a flashlight-like beam to different parts of the screen to activate four channel and power functions. Alas, the light sensors in the TV were sensitive to other sources, like lamps.

Enter Adler, who already had a slew of patents to his name. He suggested using ultrasonics -- high-frequency sound -- rather than light. Four small aluminum rods inside the remote produced different tones that were picked up by receptors in the set.

Zenith’s first wireless remote-control set had sold 30,000 units. Adler’s system, marketed as “Zenith Space Command” beginning in the fall of 1956, sold more than 9 million during the next quarter-century, before infrared technology replaced it. Still, as recently as the early ‘80s, only one in five homes had a remote-controlled set.

Enter cable television, which sparked more and increasingly specialized stations. Enter, too, gradually affordable videocassette recorders that let viewers tape shows and fast-forward their way past commercials. Those twin trends posed an obvious threat to TV networks and their advertisers, but both institutions reacted slowly.

It was not until the mid-’90s, when 90% of the nation’s homes had remote-control TV sets and surfing was practically a universal habit, that the networks struck back. The first shot was fired during the 1993-94 season, when NBC ordered a commercial-free “seamless” transition from “Seinfeld” to “Frasier,” prompted by studies showing viewers were several times more likely to channel-surf between shows.

In the summer of 1994, every broadcast network except Fox vowed to follow suit. In addition, ABC banned theme songs -- one of the most memorable facets of TV hits from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “Cheers” -- from all its new fall shows. ABC asked producers of its pre-existing shows to squeeze or dump their title sequences in favor of “cold” openings. An increasing number of shows began displaying closing credits over humorous outtakes, all the better to hold viewers in place. These changes are still with us. (It’s no accident that “Frasier’s” theme song, which lasts barely 20 seconds, plays at the end of the show, rather than the beginning.)

What took the networks so long? “Fifty-year habits are hard to break,” says Vince Manze, co-president and creative director of NBC’s in-house advertising agency. Before the ‘90s, “we were saying, ‘Please, let us give you every opportunity to hit that remote.’ ”

TV advertisers slowly shifted to more polished, often more humorous or ironic ads that got to the point more quickly (to ward off fast-forwarding) or employed superimposed slogans (to neutralize viewers’ use of the mute button). Until cable and VCRs took hold, TV advertisers had arrogantly employed a strategy of “interrupt and irritate,” epitomized by obnoxious jingles like a detergent company’s “Ring around the collar!” ad, said Peter Sealey, who headed marketing for Coca-Cola and Columbia Pictures and is now a marketing consultant and UC Berkeley adjunct professor.

Ad agencies began trying to bring entertainment values like storytelling to their ads. Today, campaigns like Saturn’s, which evokes the archetype of the “regular guy and gal,” draw a visceral response even if a viewer is not paying attention, said David Koranda, who worked in advertising and now teaches it at the University of Oregon. Budweiser’s “Whassup?” campaign, Coke’s polar bears and the annual, closely watched parade of eclectic Super Bowl ads are examples of the stylish advertising that would not have evolved without the specter of surfing, Koranda said.

Susan Heitler, a Denver psychologist who specializes in counseling couples, said that gender differences over the remote-- the tendency of the male to want to hold it and to change channels more frequently -- have become a helpful metaphor in her business.

“What goes on there says a lot about the relationship,” Heitler said. “Is there two-sided listening or a perpetual tug of war over whose desires count? Is there consultation: ‘Is it OK if I change it now?’ Is there negotiation: ‘Well, how about if we just take two more seconds here and then switch?’ How much is there an ability to voice concerns: ‘I’m going to get up and pay the bills in a few minutes, so I’d like to watch my program and then you can have it for the rest of the evening.’ ”

Anatomy of a flipper

A fifth of all viewers are believed to switch channels during any half hour. Like the crowd in any bar, flippers range from conservative to promiscuous (the average one fashions a personal network of about 13 channels), but younger viewers and males tend to be the most active. Among viewers who switched channels during prime time, 20% of the male viewers switched six or more times during an evening, while only 11% of channel-switching women changed that frequently, according to a 1997 study by Knowledge Networks/SRI, a New Jersey research firm. Thirty-seven percent of men switched channels 10 or more times during an evening of prime-time viewing to avoid commercials, while only 24% of women did so. It may be, Heitler says, that men have shorter attention spans. Or flipping may reflect research that found women invest more energy in adapting to their environments, while men “tend to keep an ideal in their mind and keep searching for that.” The remote engenders a more frenetic, impatient pace of watching a medium that itself has become faster-paced to discourage viewers from channel surfing. It reflects “a society that is more restless, wants to keep jumping around,” that has more information but less knowledge, said David Rothenberg, a philosopher of technology, culture and nature who teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “Lots of things are faster and easier, we have access to all this information so quickly, but do we know more? Are we better informed? It isn’t so easy to find something you want.”

In that vein, wartime channel surfing conspires against the viewer, suggests Rob Bellamy, a Duquesne University communications professor who has co-written a book on the remote control. “We have a highly fragmented media” covering the war from so many venues on the battlefield, “and this moving around [channel to channel] no doubt fragments it more,” Bellamy said.

It would’ve been comforting to find Robert Adler on his couch in a Chicago suburb, surfing through embedded-with-the-troops dispatches. But he doesn’t have cable, doesn’t watch much TV and is so disgusted by this war that when you ask him how much of it he’s viewed, he answers defiantly in an Austrian accent, “None.”

He fled Vienna in 1939 to escape the Nazis. In 2000, he was named to the first group of inductees of the Consumer Electronics Assn.’s hall of fame, joining Thomas Edison and vacuum-tube developer Lee DeForest. He quit skiing only last year (“I was getting a little bit concerned about breaking something”) and still does a bit of consulting with a firm that used another of his ultrasound inventions to develop a touch-control panel.

Adler, who has more than 150 inventions to his name, is proudest of a barometric amplifier he invented a year or so after his remote control. It was greeted as an advance by radio astronomers and antimissile radar specialists. “It was very interesting and my technological colleagues appreciated it.”

And the remote, soaked so deeply in cultural meaning?

“From a technical standpoint,” he says with a shrug, “it was cute.”