Future Shock

transience of the monthly magazine. Indeed, many books are no more than 'one-shot' magazines.

At the same time, the public's span of interest in a book – even a very popular book – is shrinking. Thus, for example, the life span of best sellers on The New York Times list is rapidly declining. There are marked irregularities from year to year, and some books manage to buck the tide. Nevertheless, if we examine the first four years for which full data on the subject is available, 1953-1956, and compare this with a similar period one decade later, 1963-1966, we find that the average best seller in the earlier period remained on the list a full 18.8 weeks. A decade later this had shrunk to 15.7 weeks. Within a ten-year-period, the life expectancy of the average best seller had shrunk by nearly one-sixth.

We can understand such trends only if we grasp the elemental underlying truth. We are witnessing an historic process that will inevitably change man's psyche. For across the board, from cosmetics to cosmology, from Twiggy-type trivia to the triumphant facts of technology, our inner images of reality, responding to the acceleration of change outside ourselves, are becoming shorter-lived, more temporary. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things and organizational forms, is becoming disposable.

THE ENGINEERED MESSAGE

If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image- bearing stimuli.

To understand why, we need first to examine the basic sources of imagery. Where do the thousands of images filed in our mental model come from? The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves – sound waves, light, etc. – strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images.

These incoming signals are of several types. Some might be called uncoded. Thus, for example, a man walks along a street and notices a leaf whipped along the sidewalk by the wind. He perceives this event through his sensory apparatus. He hears a rustling sound. He sees movement and greenness. He feels the wind. From these sensory perceptions he somehow forms a mental image. We can refer to these sensory signals as a message. But the message was not, in any ordinary sense of the term, man-made. It was not designed by anyone to communicate anything, and the man's understanding of it does not depend directly on a social code – a set of socially agreed-upon signs and definitions. We are all surrounded by and participate in such events. When they occur within range of our senses, we may pick up uncoded messages from them and convert these messages into mental images. In fact, some proportion of the images in every individual's mental model are derived from such uncoded messages.

But we also receive coded messages from outside ourselves. Coded messages are any which depend upon social convention for their meaning. All languages, whether based on words or gestures, drumbeats or dancesteps, hieroglyphs, pictographs or the arrangement of knots in a string, are codes. All messages conveyed by means of such languages are coded. We may speculate with some safety that as societies have grown larger and more complex, proliferating codes for the transmission of images from person to person, the ratio of uncoded messages received by the ordinary person has declined in favor of coded messages. We may guess, in other words, that today more of our imagery derives from man-made messages than from personal observation of raw, 'uncoded' events.

Furthermore, we can discern a subtle but significant shift in the type of coded messages as well. For the illiterate villager in an agricultural society of the past, most of the incoming messages were what might be called casual or 'do-it-yourself' communications. The peasant might engage in ordinary household conversation, banter, cracker-barrel or tavern talk, griping, complaining, boasting, baby talk, (and, in the same sense, animal talk), etc. This determined the nature of most of the coded messages he received, and one characteristic of this sort of communication is its loose, unstructured, garrulous or unedited quality.

Compare this message input with the kind of coded messages received by the ordinary citizen of the present-day industrial society. In addition to all of the above, he also receives messages – mainly from the mass media – that have been artfully fashioned by communications experts. He listens to the news; he watches carefully scripted plays, telecasts, movies; he hears much more music (a highly disciplined form of communication); he hears frequent speeches. Above all, he does something his peasant ancestor could not do: He reads – thousands of words every day, all of them carefully edited in advance.

The industrial revolution, bringing with it the enormous elaboration of the mass media, thus alters radically the nature of the messages received by the ordinary individual. In addition to receiving uncoded messages from the environment, and coded but casual messages from the people around him, the individual now begins to receive a growing number of coded but pre-engineered messages as well.

These engineered messages differ from the casual or do-it-yourself product in one crucial respect: Instead of being loose or carelessly framed, the engineered product tends to be tighter, more condensed, less redundant. It is highly purposive, preprocessed to eliminate unnecessary repetition, consciously designed to maximize informational content. It is, as communications theorists say, 'information-rich.'

This highly significant but often overlooked fact can be observed by anyone who takes the trouble to compare a tape recorded sample of 500 words of ordinary household conversation (i.e., coded, but casual) with 500 words of newspaper text or movie dialogue (also coded, but engineered). Casual conversation tends to be filled with repetition and pauses. Ideas are repeated several times, often in identical words, but if not, then varied only slightly.

In contrast, the 500 words of newspaper copy or movie dialogue are carefully preedited, streamlined. They convey relatively non-repetitive ideas. They tend to be more grammatically accurate than ordinary conversation and, if presented orally, they tend to be enunciated more clearly. Waste material has been trimmed away. Editor, writer, director – everyone involved in the production of the engineered message – fights to 'keep the story moving' or to produce 'fast-paced action.' It is no accident that books, movies, television plays, are so frequently advertised as 'high-speed adventure,' 'fast-reading,' or 'breathless.' No publisher or movie producer would dare advertise his work as 'repetitive' or 'redundant.'

Thus, as radio, television, newspapers, magazines and novels sweep through society, as the proportion of engineered messages received by the individual rises (and the proportion of uncoded and coded casual messages correspondingly declines), we witness a profound change: a steady speed-up in the average pace at which image- producing messages are presented to the individual. The sea of coded information that surrounds him begins to beat at his senses with new urgency.

This helps account for the sense of hurry in everyday affairs. But if industrialism is marked by a communication's speed-up, the transition to super-industrialism is marked by intense efforts to accelerate the process even further. The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system.

MOZART ON THE RUN

In the United States today the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-two minutes per day. The same person who commits nearly an hour to newspapers also spends time reading magazines, books, signs, billboards, recipes, instructions, labels on cans, advertising on the back of breakfast food boxes, etc. Surrounded by print, he 'ingests' between 10,000 and 20,000 edited words per day of the several times that many to which he is exposed. The same person also probably spends an hour and a quarter per day listening to the radio – more if he owns an FM receiver. If he listens to news, commercials, commentary or other such programs, he will, during this period, hear about 11,000 pre-processed words. He also spends several hours watching television – add another 10,000 words or so, plus a sequence of carefully arranged, highly purposive visuals. (This is not to suggest that only words and pictures convey or evoke images. Music, too, sets the internal image machinery working, although the images produced may be completely non-verbal.)

Nothing, indeed, is quite so purposive as advertising, and today the average American adult is assaulted by a minimum of 560 advertising messages each day. Of the 560 to which he is exposed, however, he only notices seventy-six. In effect, he blocks out 484 advertising messages a day to preserve his attention for other matters.

All this represents the press of engineered messages against his senses. And the pressure is rising. In an effort to transmit even richer image-producing messages at an even faster rate, communications people, artists and