a million monkeys typing

Three Seconds

Posted January 8th, 2006 at 04:38pm

There’s a well-known maxim in advertising circles that you have approximately three seconds to hook your viewing audience with an ad. Within that time, a lot has to happen. Your viewer has to see the ad, assess the overall image, be influenced by the colours, drift to the area of main importance (the “heat”), zero in on the central visual or text message, absorb that, identify the significance of that with one’s own experience in some way, and then make a decision to carry on investigating the message or text. Now, no one tells you how to do this. The human mind is an astonishing contraption, capable of incredibly complex procedures and analysis within milliseconds, and it does all this automatically. The patience so advocated just a half-century ago is a rare commodity, and our little grey cells have been trained, as by a crack military drill, to disregard those advertisements that require more than three seconds’ investment.

Harken back to novels written in Victorian times and compare them to those today, and you’ll get a similar appreciation of how our minds are beginning to change when faced with a rapid-fire deluge of information. Way back when snuff was fashionable and the glimpse of a woman’s ankles was grounds for marriage, novels and stories often began with long and arduous descriptions of setting, delving into the intricacies of weather, tree branches, rock formations, the collapsing of a farmer’s wall down the road, and the progressive deterioration of several generations of day lilies. Today, we tend to favour in media res, beginning in the middle of things. The first paragraph of the first chapter, and we are already on the roller-coaster, holding tight. (Yes, literary pundits will think of a million exceptions here — I’m speaking in generalities.)

And then there’s incoming information, such as news. When you look at century-old newspapers (well, all but the most lurid ones — the Illustrated Police News‘ graphic and gruesome depictions of crimes such as those of Jack the Ripper are a notable exception), you’ll find many long-winded though inconsequential paragraphs that are polite to the point of verbosity, and verbose to the point of inducing sleep. Nowadays, we have approximately two seconds per headline, and –if we’re still interested– approximately three seconds’ reading to decide if we want to carry on with the rest. Hence the snappy, terse and oft-sensational writing of many modern papers and tabloids.

And then there’s that darn source of endless interaction, distraction and inaction, the Internet. How is that affecting the way we take in and process information? A few months ago, I posted an entry here called Who Would You Phone?, wherein I gave the example of a quiz show contestant with a choice to phone either someone with a good general knowledge-base, or someone well-versed with Google; I suspect that most people would choose the latter. This post was just picked up by my favourite educational blog, Weblogg-ed: go there and read Will’s lucid commentary, along with some very interesting ideas from his readers. Meanwhile, I’m just going to follow up with a few more thoughts here on my own little venue.

I’ve always maintained that folks today (and especially children) living in a technological society are being forced to adapt to a new way of learning and understanding, one that puts into place a number of “filters” to sift through vast quantities of information, gather the pertinent items, allocate a certain importance to each nugget found, and then bring these often-disparate items into some sort of tighter and holistic focus (which is quite close to the “vetting, synthesizing and recognizing patterns” that Will mentions on Weblogg-ed). Faced with over a thousand pieces of significant information per hour, how would we not? Bloglines, del.icio.us, DEVONthink/ DEVONagent, Tinderbox, Zoot, Copernic, and other web-based and client-side applications are there to help us, of course, as is the ability of Google to present results by way of both popularity and pertinence (well, depending on your search skills, of course).

And while we can teach people about acquiring and fine-tuning certain of these filters, most of them will come naturally over time as we learn to deal more effectively with the deluge of data. It’s similar to how we’ve learned to implement a “three second timer.”

Now, while it was never my intention in the original article to propose a return to yesterday (I definitely prefer the instant access of online library catalogues over their card brethern, and I use Wikipedia far more often than its two-hundred pound cousin atop the bookshelves), my main concern was how we were displacing knowledge with information retrieval. That contraption inside our skulls is a far more powerful computer than any search engine, and its primary strength relies upon its ability to analyse. Chief, then, is the comprehension of an undercurrent beneath the facts, upon which the facts can be seen and understood in their proper perspective. For example, while we don’t need to remember all the gods atop Mount Olympus, we should be familiar with the notion of myth and how it applies to our understanding of culture, history, religion and science. The dates pertaining to the rise and fall of the Third Reich mean little without realising the how and why. It’s the age-old and interdependent cycle of analysis and facts: facts, by themselves, are quite useless. Information retrieval, in itself, means nothing without the ability to process that data.

So, yes, filters are important in this age. But I lament the situation of many students I know who believe that finding information quickly is an excellent substitute for knowing or understanding it.

To be sure, we gather and we filter more effectively each day. And our power of analysis is just as robust today as ever. So where does the problem lie?

The missing link today, I maintain, is the ability to focus. This is the private time, the breathing space, that the mind needs to assimilate and digest the information. Think about cramming for an exam — spending a day or two of intense study– as opposed to paying attention to the material all throughout a semester and learning it slowly, incrementally. One results in a quick but lacklustre pass, while the other leads to long-term understanding of the subject. Each day we cram more into our skulls, and understand less, because we are devaluing the notion of focus.

How to focus, though, is quite another matter, and one that differs so much per individual, circumstance and subject matter that it becomes impossible to produce a one-size-fits-all answer. For example, I find I can focus better on productivity issues –on gathering facts, analysing them, and making decisions– with a paper-based planner system. I learn facts better by sitting down in a nice cozy chair, in a room free of distractions, with a real book. I focus upon digital data by gathering all the important stuff into DEVONthink, letting it come up with correlations, and musing upon how it all fits together. And I’m far more creative when I can focus on a piece of paper or a whiteboard for extended periods in a room with creative individuals, instead of a solitary computer screen. That works for me — other people will find better tools for the job.

Really, it’s all about learning to think through the noise. Gathering, filtering and analysing are skills learned by exposure and experience, but focus is the only thing we must try hard to achieve. Lack of it is the single greatest obstacle to productivity and education today, one that can’t be solved simply by throwing more technology and data at it. Indeed, those three seconds may become two.