Present TenseShane HegartyThere are few more predictably inane moments of any week than when viewers' comments scroll across the screen during The Late Late Show. How worthwhile is it to ask the public to digest the complexities of a social conundrum, and then invite them to comment on it in 160 characters or less?
It is why those comments tend to be a variation on the theme of "I agree with that man." And because it needs a certain motivation to lift a mobile phone rather than a glass of wine on a Friday night, they also tend to be weighted towards the opinion that, yes, modern Ireland is dangerous/unfriendly/generally not as good as it used to be. And every week, it occurs to you that if you wanted reactionary, inarticulate and shallow opinions, then you'd have gone down to the dingiest corner of the pub hours ago.
This year BBC Radio 4 presenter Eddie Mair won a prestigious Sony Gold Award for Interactivity. His reaction? To rubbish the whole idea of interactivity. Mair wasn't addressing the supposed "added value" given by broadcasters and newspapers - either through red buttons on the remote control or their sprawling websites - but the added avenue given to the public's opinions. Traditionally, he said this week, "the only thing the listener had to do was listen".
"If they felt very strongly about the programme they could write in, of course, but those letters always went straight in the bin. And quite right. If we wanted to know what a bunch of unqualified loons thought we'd have put a vox pop in the show." The practice of reading out letters, he observed, spawned the phone-in. "People you would move house to avoid were suddenly on your radio, burbling and dribbling. 'The trouble with this country' or 'the thing about jam is' or 'my brother-in-law knew someone who' is the backbone of radio with no backbone."
He complained that, in an age of texting and e-mail, hacks will soon make programmes based on what listeners rather than the well-paid professionals decide. It might be argued, of course, that that should be a central purpose of public-service broadcasting. But Mair's enjoyable rant did spotlight just how much indulgent and pointless content is put on the airwaves, on the assumption that that is what people want. When, in fact, it might be only what some people want, namely those whom it indulges.
In practical terms, it means that radio hosts spend much of their studio time reading a computer screen and filtering the raving from the rational. And time given to speaking to those who actually know something about a subject is being sacrificed for opinions from those who don't. Although this has created a strange - and sometimes successful - subgenre
of radio, in which the show becomes almost entirely about listeners' reactions to other listeners' comments. Ray D'Arcy's Today FM show thrives off it. Sean Moncrieff's Newstalk show would be nothing without it.
On television, interactivity has become a troublesome necessity, whether it's through comments, opinion polls or endless quizzes. Countless chunks of news broadcasts are now given to pointless polls or viewers' e-mails. Anne Enright's brush with the media this week showed how quickly the public could, through newspaper websites, comment on an article they hadn't read and knew about only through reports that had taken her remarks on the McCanns out of context.
But because interactivity is considered an "essential" part of modern broadcasting, its usefulness is overlooked. It long ago reached a point at which Sky News could ask its viewers if they thought that they were being overcharged for using their mobiles. And told them they could vote yes or no at the usual rate.
The burdens placed by the wider use of interactivity have proved obvious. The recent scandals on British television, already rife through the BBC, have been added to by ITV's announcement that it pilfered €11 million from viewers. The extra demands that phone-ins and text competitions place on those working in radio and television shows contributed to them falsifying competition results, inventing winners and misleading viewers.
But it can be profitable. Whatever about the cost of entering competitions, Newstalk charges texters 30c for each opinion. You'd need to be pretty riled to give so many pennies for your thoughts.
There is an irony in me writing on this topic, given that I've been writing a blog on The Irish Times website for six months. What is that but a sop to interactivity and a new avenue to air the public's views? (While also posing the question of how many more opinions we really need from opinion writers, never mind readers.) The blog's s value is up to others to judge, but, as with everything that invites pithy opinions, throws open polls and markets itself as boldly, modishly "interactive", it adds to the white noise. It would be snobbish of any professional journalist to presume that the public's contribution is pointless - but in the wrong format, it pretty much is. Interactivity is often worthwhile, but does it mean that we need to keep shovelling opinions into a digital landfill?