Specifically how has time compression resulted in attention compression?

We no longer sit down to write long letters. Why struggle with a long letter when you can pick up the telephone and interact? "Hi sweetheart—Here I am. Good to hear your voice. Are you free to­morrow night?"

Instant access. Instant response.

(Videophones and videocards will even supplant the postcard. Simply insert the videocard into your VCR and play it back live as often as you wish.)

We resist long books. By the time an idea or a story crystallizes in book form it has already played on television and radio and in maga­zines. Long books are hopelessly slow for our times. If an author cannot get it together in one or two hundred pages—forget it. The author is not addressing today's world.

More and more people refuse to sit still for three hours listening to a concert in a concert hall or listening to a long lecture. We are inter­active generations conditioned by two-way feedback technology and brainstorming. We want to interact: talk back—sing along—jump up and down. One-way broadcast formats are increasingly out of sync.

People with high-tech attention spans have little patience for low-tech activities such as reading long documents or balancing monthly bank accounts.

More and more of us expect variety in all areas of our lives. Global TV introduces new people to us day and night. We have come to expect continuous sense-update. Seeing the same person or persons night after night overloads our circuitries.

A recent New York Times article titled " 'Lite' Decade: Less Has Become More" by William R. Greer alludes to this new fluidity.¹ "Sociologists say that 'lite' which started as a marketing term used to denote dietetic products, has become a metaphor for what Americans are seeking in disparate parts of their lives.

"In their relationships for example they have turned away from soul-searching and stress of emotional commitment . . . They seek light relationships.

"They can undergo psychoanalysis in one sitting because today's psychotherapy skips the formative years . . . Society wants current needs solved.

In the new electronic environment even print-oriented industrial-age people are slow. They exchange information at printpace.

Print uses more words and is slower than electronics. But it is not more profound. We are conditioned to think that it is.

People interviewed on television often express frustration at not hav­ing "enough time to explain." The problem is not with television. We have to learn to compress our thoughts more effectively. Electronic media such as TV and telephone demand a cohesion and organization of thoughts that print seldom does.

Electronic media are helping us rewire our way of communicating. They are helping us pare down and streamline. We are learning to say more in less time and with fewer words. We automatically edit out formalities and superfluities of slower times. We are more direct and cogent—often without our own awareness.

We are learning to shed verbal fat—not profundity.

Many years ago when interactive (talkback) radio and television came on line callers were embarrassingly clumsy. They hemmed and hawed and digressed before finally getting to the point. In time radio and TV helped listeners organize their thoughts and streamline their delivery. The result is that today's callers are far more succinct.

Speech compression—saying more with less—will continue to de­velop as electronics become more pervasive. Soon we will routinely dialogue with everyday machines. Later on we will converse with ultra-intelligent robots—androids—replicants. These new beings will not wait around. By the time you have finished saying "How do you do and how is your uncle?" they will have exchanged nine million bits of information.

By the year 2020 we will automatically say in a couple of minutes what now takes us fifteen minutes to convey. Our attention span will contract even more.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 847