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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 2000 Quantity not quality IN the never-ending fight to keep up with an increasing avalanche of data, I have abandoned newspapers, radio and television and taken to my laptop screen for my information feeds. With all my text in a digital form, it is possible to apply filters and selection mechanisms that minimise the words I have to read. Once selected, I can employ an auto-text summariser to cut large items down to a small fraction of their original length. If this prcis copy proves interesting, I can take a bigger byte and read a much larger sample. But I still find the textual overload condition often persists and I have had to evolve speed-reading to the limits of my personal capacity. Again, with digital text, I can select all, triple-space, go to 22 point, and stare at the screen while holding down the scroll bar. The net result has been a near-quadrupling of my natural reading speed, with an acceptable deterioration in my comprehension. A further powerful technique requires the use of text-to-speech software and aligns well with radio, which is more time-economic in as much as the information input is almost subliminal. This means that I can continue to work on something else at the same time as casually listening. Surprisingly, it is possible to listen to two or three audio channels at the same time and almost subconsciously decode the key information. But as the number of channels increases beyond three, it rapidly becomes unsustainable, with higher levels of concentration necessary to cope with the jumble of verbiage. Any television or any moving image feed is inherently more problematic as it tends to demand our attention and, at best, can be distracting even when pushed into the background. But again we can accommodate multiple parallel feeds as we have a far greater ability to visually filter than our acoustic equivalent. Looking at an array of 5x5 personal computer or TV screens, we can easily focus on the one or two of immediate interest. However, beyond this number sees an increasing degree of confusion and difficulty in zeroing in and concentrating. What happens next? Are there other mechanisms by which we can absorb information even faster? Well, apart from making better use of graphics and embedded video, we could employ 3D and virtual reality to extend our perception, although for most documents the gain appears marginal. Unless a lot of front-end processing and formatting is used, 3D and VR offer little gain. A more obvious route is to speed up audio and video feeds, fast-forward to important sections, remove quiet, inactive periods, and fast-play item by item. For those of you that recall vinyl records, it was quite easy to recognise the contents of a 16rpm LP played at 33, or even 45rpm. So why not radio, TV, and text-to-speech? Would it work? Oh yes. Does the technology exist? Not really. It currently takes a good deal of effort to speed up speech and video and, as far as I can tell, there is nothing available commercially, although there is a latent demand from the increasingly info-weary. Speed-reading, listening or viewing appear to increase our input rate by a factor of four. With prcis processing, another factor of four or so is on offer, and it appears our input capacity could be extended to around 16-fold. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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