In Praise of Content

I visited the US Tennis Open twice last week. We live very nearby, so try to go at least once every year. Overall, it is a marvellous experience. The real advantage over other sporting events in the US is how close you can be to the players. If you go during the first week and purchase ground admission only, you can place yourself on an outside court and find a wonderful degree of intimacy to the players and the ebb and flow of a match.

Here are one or two tips. The evil ticketmaster has been contracted by the tennis association to manage all ticketing. A consequence of this is that ticket prices are dynamic, even standard non-resale tickets. If you book a month in advance, you can pick up a grounds ticket for maybe $30, but closer to the tournament the price doubles, then doubles again, and even doubles one more time. Book early, and take a risk on the weather. Ticketmaster also insist on using mobile phones for ticket verification, which is all very well so long as your phone is not old like mine. The first visit this year I stood in line for an hour at will-call. The second time, I was smart enough to enlist the help of some young volunteers available for tech dummies like me. Once such volunteer let me log in on her phone and then walked in through the gate with me.

Then, like with all sports, recognise that they are after your hard earned cash. Print an order of play before you leave home, or discover that they will try to charge you $5 inside the grounds. And purchase as little eat and drink as possible – the quality is not bad, but the prices are crazy. Finally, wear a hat and be ready for different temperatures. I was fooled by a weather forecast, and am still bothered by a top of my head that is very red indeed.

Follow all these tips, and you can enjoy a great day full of tennis, up to ten hours of it if you are lucky and ready to stay until the end. Last Friday I saw the first ball hit on court 17 at 11.15am, and the last on Armstrong at 7.30pm.

But when I got home, I reflected about what most people appreciate nowadays. I would wager that very few people did anything like what I did. Most of the time, I found myself with the best possible view of world-class sport, accompanied by only few hundred other spectators. And not all that many of those were actually watching the tennis.

From what I could observe, most people found something on their mobile phone of more interest than a live sporting match going on right in front of them, not just in the breaks but all of the time. There were people whose main interest seemed to be the camera on their phone. Then there were the celebrity hunters, looking for Roger Federer walking to his locker room or Chrissie Evert’s back in the ESPN booth than watching live tennis from two lesser but still pretty talented mortals.

Then you can add in the chatters, the wanderers, the shoppers and the concession surfers, many of these people dressed to impress.

Bemused, I tried to work out what was going on here by comparing the situation with others I have known. I concluded that partly this is a New York thing. Somehow, New Yorkers are a bit about show and expressing emotion rather than accepting gifts of content. It seems to be OK to be late – at the baseball, the crowd seems to build after three or four innings and then decline again soon afterwards, whatever the state of the game.

Perhaps one issue is that many people have not paid for the tickets themselves because of corporate or club giveaways, so value them less. Others are so wealthy that the ticket price is peanuts to them – or maybe want things to appear that way.

There is also something fundamentally ungrateful about New Yorkers. I went to a wedding reception last weekend, a good party that regular people had paid a lot of money to make happen for me and the other guests. Yet there were empty seats. One couple I spoke with confessed they were in two minds about whether to show up until the last minute, because, apparently, they were tired. This feels so disrespectful to me. I wonder if this is unique to New York.

But the bigger issue may be about generations and attention spans and motivations.

Our son is a soccer fan, supporting Arsenal. Yet he cannot watch more than five minutes of a game without getting distracted. I think this has become normal in the generation of the smartphone.

I am not quite sure why it is. There are certainly more distractions available these days. Teaching at school has become more about short bursts than long hauls – reading books and writing essays are dying arts, and tests are mainly multiple choice. Movies are more and more dominated by instant thrills rather than developing plot lines.

Then the phone itself is not just the source of distraction but also the source of temptation to share. That makes sitting down and enjoying content less attractive, since that reduces the material to share, and adds to the fear that others are having more fun, the fear of missing out.

I am not sure whether all this is much of a bad thing. I don’t want to become another old person boring on about the good old days and knocking smartphone culture. Kids these days are often smart, and socially conscious and respectful, and resourceful. Did we really want to continue teaching based on learning lists of kings and queens?

Still, there do seem to be some downsides about the lack of appetite for content that takes more time to develop. Maybe people are missing out on something good. There is something unique in slow moving drama, whether in sports or a good book or on TV. The young seem to have lost the art of appreciation for that.

More important, is humanity, at least in the US, losing its ability to master extensive content completely? In my career, there was always a place for conciseness and for engaging formats, but some issues required plentiful reading or writing to truly understand and to create effective policy. Will the smartphone generation simply not have that skill?

Perhaps there is already some evidence in the Trump presidency. Firstly, it seems that a content averse generation is more likely to elect based on sound bites or personality rather than on policy content. I was astonished that the lack of published policy in the US election last year, and the manifestos in the UK one in 2017 were certainly weaker than what had come before.

Electing based on sound bits is one thing, but governing based on them is another. I read this week that lobbyists in Washington were now being asked to craft policy documents, since the capability within the administration was not there. Now that truly is a frightening prospect.

The shortage on STEM graduates in the US is well known. Perhaps there is another shortage likely to arise, that of graduates able to create or master detailed written content. If this is a US phenomenon only, it surely presages a deep competitive disadvantage, as well as giving a clue to future students where to focus to do well. If it is global, then that signals an inhibitor to human progress.

Modern technology does many good things, and generally I am an optimist about the youth of today. But these idle thoughts while enjoying tennis matches in relative solitude certainly gave me pause.