Future Shock

others consciously work to make each instant of exposure to the mass media carry a heavier informational and emotional freight.

Thus we see the widespread and increasing use of symbolism for compacting information. Today advertising men, in a deliberate attempt to cram more messages into the individual's mind within a given moment of time, make increasing use of the symbolic techniques of the arts. Consider the 'tiger' that is allegedly put in one's tank. Here a single word transmits to the audience a distinct visual image that has been associated since childhood with power, speed, and force. The pages of advertising trade magazines like Printer's Ink are filled with sophisticated technical articles about the use of verbal and visual symbolism to accelerate image-flow. Indeed, today many artists might learn new imageaccelerating techniques from the advertising men.

If the ad men, who must pay for each split second of time on radio or television, and who fight for the reader's fleeting attention in magazines and newspapers, are busy trying to communicate maximum imagery in minimum time, there is evidence, too, that at least some members of the public want to increase the rate at which they can receive messages and process images. This explains the phenomenal success of speed-reading courses among college students, business executives, politicians and others. One leading speed-reading school claims it can increase almost anyone's input speed three times, and some readers report the ability to read literally tens of thousands of words per minute – a claim roundly disputed by many reading experts. Whether or not such speeds are possible, the clear fact is that the rate of communication is accelerating. Busy people wage a desperate battle each day to plow through as much information as possible. Speed-reading presumably helps them do this.

The impulse toward acceleration in communications is, however, by no means limited to advertising or to the printed word. A desire to maximize message content in minimum time explains, for example, the experiments conducted by psychologists at the American Institutes for Research who played taped lectures at faster than normal speeds and then tested the comprehension of listeners. Their purpose: to discover whether students would learn more if lecturers talked faster.

The same intent to accelerate information flow explains the recent obsession with splitscreen and multiscreen movies. At the Montreal World's Fair, viewers in pavilion after pavilion were confronted not with a traditional movie screen on which ordered visual images appear in sequence, but with two, three, or five screens, each of them hurling messages at the viewer at the same time. On these, several stories play themselves out at the same time, demanding of the viewer the ability to accept many more messages simultaneously than any movie-goer in the past, or else to censor out, or block, certain messages to keep the rate of message-input, or image-stimulation, within reasonable limits.

The author of an article in Life, entitled 'A Film Revolution to Blitz Man's Mind,' accurately describes the experience in these words: 'Having to look at six images at the same time, having to watch in twenty minutes the equivalent of a full length movie, excites and crams the mind.' Elsewhere he suggests that another multi-screen film 'by putting more into a moment, condenses time.'

Even in music the same accelerative thrust is increasingly evident. A conference of composers and computer specialists held in San Francisco not long ago was informed that for several centuries music has been undergoing 'an increase in the amount of auditory information transmitted during a given interval of time,' and there is evidence also that musicians today play the music of Mozart, Bach and Haydn at a faster tempo than that at which the same music was performed at the time it was composed. We are getting Mozart on the run.

THE SEMI-LITERATE SHAKESPEARE

If our images of reality are changing more rapidly, and the machinery of image-transmission is being speeded up, a parallel change is altering the very codes we use. For language, too, is convulsing. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, senior editor of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 'The words we use are changing faster today – and not merely on the slang level, but on every level. The rapidity with which words come and go is vastly accelerated. This seems to be true not only of English, but of French, Russian and Japanese as well.'

Flexner illustrated this with the arresting suggestion that, of the estimated 450,000 'usable' words in the English language today, only perhaps 250,000 would be comprehensible to William Shakespeare. Were Shakespeare suddenly to materialize in London or New York today, he would be able to understand, on the average, only five out of every nine words in our vocabulary. The Bard would be a semi-literate.

This implies that if the language had the same number of words in Shakespeare's time as it does today, at least 200,000 words – perhaps several times that many – have dropped out and been replaced in the intervening four centuries. Moreover, Flexner conjectures that a full third of this turnover has occurred within the last fifty years alone. This, if correct, would mean that words are now dropping out of the language and being replaced at a rate at least three times faster than during the base period 1564 to 1914.

This high turnover rate reflects changes in things, processes, and qualities in the environment. Some new words come directly from the world of consumer products and technology. Thus, for example, words like 'fast- back,' 'wash-and-wear' or flashcube' were all propelled into the language by advertising in recent years. Other words come from the headlines. 'Sit-in' and 'swim-in' are recent products of the civil rights movement; 'teach-in' a product of the campaign against the Vietnam war; 'be-in' and 'love-in' products of the hippie subculture. The LSD cult has brought with it a profusion of new words – 'acid-head,' 'psychedelic,' etc.

At the level of slang, the turnover rate is so rapid that it has forced dictionary makers to change their criteria for word inclusion. 'In 1954,' says Flexner, 'when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang, I would not consider a word for inclusion unless I could find three uses of the word over a five- year period. Today such a criterion would be impossible. Language, like art, is increasingly becoming a fad proposition. The slang terms 'fab' and 'gear,' for example, didn't last a single year. They entered the teen-age vocabulary in about 1966; by 1967 they were out. You cannot use a time criterion for slang any more.

One fact contributing to the rapid introduction and obsolescence of words is the incredible speed with which a new word can be injected into wide usage. In the late 1950's and early sixties one could actually trace the way in which certain scholarly jargon words such as 'rubric' or 'subsumed' were picked up from academic journals, used in smallcirculation periodicals like the New York Review of Books or Commentary, then adopted by Esquire with its then circulation of 800,000 to 1,000,000, and finally diffused through the larger society by Time, Newsweek and the larger mass magazines. Today the process has been telescoped. The editors of mass magazines no longer pick up vocabulary from the intermediate intellectual publications alone; they, too, lift directly from the scholarly press in their hurry to be 'on top of things.'

When Susan Sontag disinterred the word 'camp' and used it as the basis of an essay in Partisan Review

in the fall of 1964, Time waited only a few weeks before devoting an article to the word and its rejuvenator. Within a matter of a few additional weeks, the term was cropping up in newspapers and other mass media. Today the word has virtually dropped out of usage. 'Teenybopper' is another word that came and went with blinding speed.

A more significant example of language turnover can be seen in the sudden shift of meaning associated with the ethnic term 'black.' For years, dark-skinned Americans regarded the term as racist. Liberal whites dutifully taught their children to use the term 'Negro' and to capitalize the 'N.' Shortly after Stokely Carmichael proclaimed the doctrine of Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966, however, 'black' became a term of pride among both blacks and whites in the movement for racial justice. Caught off guard, liberal whites went through a period of confusion, uncertain as to whether to use Negro or black. Black was quickly legitimated when the mass media adopted the new meaning. Within a few months, black was 'in,' Negro 'out.'

Even faster cases of diffusion are on record. 'The Beatles,' says lexicographer Flexner, 'at the height of their fame could make up any word they like, slip it into a record, and within a month it would be part of the language. At one time perhaps no more than fifty people in NASA used the word 'A-OK.' But when an astronaut used it during a televised flight, the word became part of the language in a single day. The same has been true of other space terms, too – lik 'sputnik' or 'all systems go.''

As new words sweep in, old words vanish. A picture of a nude girl nowadays is no longer a 'pin-up' or a 'cheesecake shot,' but a 'playmate.' 'Hep' has given way to 'hip'; 'hipster' to 'hippie.' 'Go-go' rushed eagerly into the language at breakneck speed, but it is already gone-gone among those who are truly 'with it.'

The turnover of language would even appear to involve non-verbal forms of communication as well. We