Only time for a quick byte

Standing in a shower of rain a week ago Wednesday, I got to see the change to snow coming towards me in a single white line, like a curtain pulling across the autumn-yellow fields in a vertical fall.

It was on me before I could even say what it was out loud - one moment, soaking droplets, the next, the wet fat stars of gathered flakes that make up the first fall snows.

There - I either lost you completely, or I found you in one paragraph.

But it's that quick, and it's getting quicker. Next year, maybe it will be three single words.
So, thank Pavlov. Or at least, thank him for putting a name to it all.

Ivan Pavlov is best known for describing what's known as classical conditioning. He found that test animals, particularly dogs, had reflex reactions to regular stimuli. If they regularly heard a bell ringing before they were fed, for example, they'd start salivating just at the sound of the bell.

It happens to us, too, and it's fascinating to watch.

And I don't think it's just because I'm getting older, and perhaps slower.

We have the world at our fingertips with the Internet, the ability to search thousands of articles from wildly different perspectives. Court cases from the Supreme Court of Fiji are here: http://www.paclii.org/fj/cases/FJSC/ - pictures and a write-up on eyeless, mouthless whale-bone-eating-worms live here: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1113/2.

The speed with which we can track things down is amazing, and the volume of things we can track down is more so.

But the fact is, I'm beginning to think we're conditioning ourselves right out of being able to use it all. We've got a surfeit of quantity, to the point that we can't even taste quality anymore.

We're so used to cutting to the chase - getting information, music, games immediately - that we're actually shedding crucial parts of our attention span.

We're conditioned not to need attention, because we're dealing in the now.

Facebook and Twitter focus on the short and the now - "I'm eating eggs - now, I'm washing the plate."

Interesting, if you like to hear about your friends and their plates, but it leaks over into other things as well.

There's a regular lament that the media doesn't focus on involved stories in this province, or even in this country as a whole.

There's a host of reasons for that, from workloads to budgets, but one of the simplest is that, with the shortening of attention spans, readers and viewers seem much more attuned to the emotional - and the quickest dart of the emotional, at that.

Complex stories that you expect to draw extensive readership, don't always - with the Internet, you can see where the eyeballs are going, and what they like to read.

Contemporary newspaper science, if there is such a thing, suggests shorter, faster stories are what's desired.

When stories "turn" from one page to the next - starting on page one, for example, and finishing on page four - few eyeballs go with them.

And it's not just that.

Don't listen to a whole CD and learn to like some songs that you didn't appreciate the first few times through - you don't have to.

Build a playlist of only the songs you already know you like. Don't look for wheat in the chaff - you may end up with a smaller load of wheat, but you can listen to it full-time.

Ten channels aren't enough, and 50 is only a beginning; watch a young expert with the channel changer, and you'll realize how fast they can view and reject a channel before older viewers even have an idea of where they've been.

But you can only take in so much information. We can handle the flickering passage of 50 channels, or the first paragraph of 50 websites, but that doesn't mean we're taking in any more.

Don't even get started on cellphones and text-messaging; we're caught up enough in the process that it can override our attention for anything else, and the gentle buzz of the cellphone on vibrate can elicit a grab-and-open reflex that Pavlov himself would understand in an instant.

We're conditioning ourselves to expect the crack cocaine of immediate gratification - and when we can't get that short, sharp shock immediately, we move on to somewhere where we can. And we're losing the finer parts in the process.

Last week, there was news that teens and young adults are watching less and less television. It simply doesn't move fast enough.

But television is already broken into 22-minute condensed versions of the real world.
If you're conditioned for speed, just imagine how boring the real world must be.
Wait a minute.

Was there a baby in that bathwater?

Russell Wangersky is editorial page editor of the St. John's Telegram. He can be reached by email at rwanger@thetelegram.com.