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.We can understand such trends only if we grasp the elemental underlying truth.We arewitnessing 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, arebecoming shorter-lived, more temporary.We are creating and using up ideas and images at afaster and faster pace.Knowledge, like people, places, things and organizational forms, isbecoming disposable.THE ENGINEERED MESSAGEIf our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reasonmay well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at oursenses.Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence thatwe 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 dothe thousands of images filed in our mental model come from? The external environmentshowers stimuli upon us.Signals originating outside ourselves sound waves, light, etc.strike our sensory organs.Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a stillmysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images.These incoming signals are of several types.Some might be called uncoded.Thus, forexample, a man walks along a street and notices a leaf whipped along the sidewalk by thewind.He perceives this event through his sensory apparatus.He hears a rustling sound.Hesees movement and greenness.He feels the wind.From these sensory perceptions hesomehow forms a mental image.We can refer to these sensory signals as a message.But themessage was not, in any ordinary sense of the term, man-made.It was not designed byanyone to communicate anything, and the man's understanding of it does not depend directlyon a social code a set of socially agreed-upon signs and definitions.We are all surroundedby and participate in such events.When they occur within range of our senses, we may pickup 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 suchuncoded messages.But we also receive coded messages from outside ourselves.Coded messages are anywhich depend upon social convention for their meaning.All languages, whether based onwords or gestures, drumbeats or dancesteps, hieroglyphs, pictographs or the arrangement ofknots 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 uncodedmessages received by the ordinary person has declined in favor of coded messages.We mayguess, in other words, that today more of our imagery derives from man-made messages thanfrom personal observation of raw, "uncoded" events.Furthermore, we can discern a subtle but significant shift in the type of coded messagesas well.For the illiterate villager in an agricultural society of the past, most of the incomingmessages were what might be called casual or "do-it-yourself" communications.The peasantmight engage in ordinary household conversation, banter, cracker-barrel or tavern talk, griping, complaining, boasting, baby talk, (and, in the same sense, animal talk), etc.Thisdetermined the nature of most of the coded messages he received, and one characteristic ofthis sort of communication is its loose, unstructured, garrulous or unedited quality.Compare this message input with the kind of coded messages received by the ordinarycitizen of the present-day industrial society.In addition to all of the above, he also receivesmessages mainly from the mass media that have been artfully fashioned bycommunications 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.Inaddition to receiving uncoded messages from the environment, and coded but casualmessages from the people around him, the individual now begins to receive a growingnumber of coded but pre-engineered messages as well.These engineered messages differ from the casual or do-it-yourself product in onecrucial respect: Instead of being loose or carelessly framed, the engineered product tends tobe tighter, more condensed, less redundant.It is highly purposive, preprocessed to eliminateunnecessary repetition, consciously designed to maximize informational content.It is, ascommunications theorists say, "information-rich."This highly significant but often overlooked fact can be observed by anyone who takesthe trouble to compare a tape recorded sample of 500 words of ordinary householdconversation (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 andpauses.Ideas are repeated several times, often in identical words, but if not, then varied onlyslightly.In contrast, the 500 words of newspaper copy or movie dialogue are carefully pre-edited, streamlined.They convey relatively non-repetitive ideas.They tend to be moregrammatically accurate than ordinary conversation and, if presented orally, they tend to beenunciated more clearly.Waste material has been trimmed away.Editor, writer, directoreveryone involved in the production of the engineered message fights to "keep the storymoving" or to produce "fast-paced action." It is no accident that books, movies, televisionplays, 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, asthe proportion of engineered messages received by the individual rises (and the proportion ofuncoded and coded casual messages correspondingly declines), we witness a profoundchange: a steady speed-up in the average pace at which image-producing messages arepresented to the individual.The sea of coded information that surrounds him begins to beat athis senses with new urgency.This helps account for the sense of hurry in everyday affairs.But if industrialism ismarked by a communication's speed-up, the transition to super-industrialism is marked byintense efforts to accelerate the process even further.The waves of coded information turninto violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as itwere, to our nervous system.MOZART ON THE RUN In the United States today the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-twominutes per day
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