It's been hard for some of the younger filmmakers to rediscover those traditional values. I know someone who teaches film in California. He always assigns his students 19th -century novels to read, rather than having them see too many movies. They'll never learn narrative structure from other movies, but they will learn it from reading great novels. Commercials and MTV also have shortened our attention span.
Speed is one of the things that has affected television.
On the other hand, some of the British television dramatic series and adaptations of the classics which have such a strong audience here actually represent a reaction against this speed, and a nostalgia for the older, more leisurely kind of storytelling. So here we are in the modern world, with instant access and gratification, communications overload, obsolescence, and the Internet. The media covers events so thoroughly that they quickly become part of the national mythology. We're going to see the ripple effects of the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, in a number of the arts, in which people will create something expressing their feelings but perhaps with little resemblance to the outcome of the original case. Basically, we're living in a media-saturated environment.