Speeding toward 2055

I was doing some research, making notes on the commercials shown during the CBS Evening News. Only during programs like the CBS Evening News can you find the only remaining commercials aimed at my 60-something male demographic, and I thought it worthwhile to gather some details.

But as I was gathering, I started unconsciously itemizing the news elements as well. At the end of the 30 minutes, the CBS Evening News had presented 14 news stories and 20 commercials.
That means the program gave us 34 elements in 30 minutes, or an average of one element every 53 seconds.

The result begs two questions.
Where is the depth?
How can we possibly absorb information that fast?

The answer to the first question is that there is no depth. You get depth from print, not from television.

The answer to the second question is that we can in fact absorb information much faster than one element every 53 seconds. Two or three of the commercials were five seconds long. Two or three of the stories were 10-second stories. Hardly any of the commercials were more than 15 seconds long.

Slowly but surely in the last 30 years, humans have been programmed to save corporations money. The ATM card was an early example, and then phone trees, and other technical examples where the work load of expensive tellers, cashiers and clerks has been shifted to individual consumers.

In the case of the CBS Evening News, consumers have been trained to interpret images quickly. The quicker we can interpret an image, the more bang the advertiser gets for every buck. Say the program charges $100,000 per 30 seconds of commercial time. If an advertiser has an image it thinks we can understand in five seconds, why buy a 30-second commercial for $100,000, when they can do the five-second shot for $17,000?

In this way, 20 commercials can be fitted into a 30-minute evening news program that supposedly encapsulates all the major events happening that day in a very busy world. The news side obviously is behind the commercial side, able to present only 14 news elements in the half-hour. Journalism is not yet to the point where a news anchor can look into the camera and say, "Osama bin Laden," and expect the consumer to know exactly what he is talking about, the way we understand the message when someone comes on the screen and says, "Pepsi."

At this point I am compelled to look backward 50 years, and then forward 50 years. In 1955 in my hometown there were two television stations, there was no evening news, and the commercials were 60 seconds long, or more. I was able to process these images well enough to understand what was going on.

If, however, you lifted me out of 1955 and transported me to 2005, sat me down and put a remote in my hand, it wouldn’t be five minutes before my head exploded.

As it is, it took me 50 years, one day at a time, to learn to process images fast enough to make sense of the CBS Evening News in 2005. That I can do it at all, affirms the suggestion of the neuro researchers that we have only begun to explore the power of the human brain.

Now I am imagining the year 2055, 50 years from now, and looking back to 2005, amazed by how primitive we were, able to absorb only 34 elements in the CBS Evening News. In 2055, we have learned to see and process two images at the same time, so that we’re watching 30 straight minutes of news and commercials side-by-side, or super-imposed, or whatever.

How weird could such a world be? No weirder than 1955, I can tell you.