How technology and the internet have changed our perception of information

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Art Director Denis Zolotarev - about how information technology has influenced people, why it became more difficult for us to concentrate and why emojis have become so popular.

The emergence and development of the global Web can be considered an event comparable in importance to the invention of book printing: the technology of printing with movable letters over a couple of centuries has turned all the principles of reproduction, distribution and consumption of information. The Internet was enough for the same for several decades.

How have we ourselves changed as a result? What are the characteristics of the perception of information by today's average web user? Do they have positive or negative consequences? Let's try to answer these questions.

I have identified a number of trends that have emerged among active users - those people who are most immersed in digital communications. This list is subjective and mainly describes what I see around me and what changes I observe in myself.

1. We are faster

Now we perceive more data per unit of time, our "throughput" has increased.

The daily volume of information necessary for assimilation is growing, the time for the consumption of individual fragments is becoming less and less. At the same time, the information capacity of messages tends to remain at the same level. This leads to "densification" of messages and an increase in our "throughput".

Check out how Apple's videos have changed over the past 9 years:

2009 - iPhone 3GS

2011 - iPhone 4s

2016 - iPhone 7 and 7 Plus

2017 - iPhone X

The latest videos don't even have a voiceover. The voice is too long. The text is perceived much faster.

But it cannot be argued that the speed of high-quality information processing is also increasing. You can load more into us in less time, but does it speed up analysis and processing?

2. Our multitasking has increased

We can simultaneously consume information from several channels or conduct several parallel communications.

Almost everyone can drive while chatting on the phone or texting at the same time. Almost everyone can speak on several topics at the same time in several messenger windows, and some can even speak within the same conversation, alternating messages.

Technology is evolving symmetrically to this, trying to provide us with maximum multitasking. The proliferation of the Picture-in-Picture function, clever notification systems that “load” new data units into us in the background, multifunctional services like Booking.com - all this is aimed at splitting our attention.

An illustrative video that demonstrates what the phone of a person with 8 million Instagram followers looks like.

As an extreme example of such adaptation, we can recall an interesting story about Apache helicopters, the super-saturated interface of which eventually led to the development of the trained pilots' ability to read two books at the same time.

3. We find it increasingly difficult to concentrate

Research conducted by Microsoft in 2015 shows that our ability to hold attention on one object was reduced to 8 seconds (usually said to be less than goldfish).

Is it so? On the one hand, everyone will agree that reading fiction has become more difficult - you constantly want to be distracted by something else. On the other hand, it had little impact on work processes. The ability to concentrate depends on the task being performed and the degree of motivation of the person. And the reliability of the research carried out raises a number of questions.

Talking about clip-like thinking that has managed to get bored is largely based on the analysis of a modern information product, explaining the ongoing changes by the needs of viewers, although this can be explained by trends in the content creation industry. For example, this study shows how the average cuts in films fell continuously from 10 seconds in the 1930s to 4 seconds in the 2010s. It seems that the representatives of the film industry have learned how to work effectively with editing and hold the viewer's attention.

An interesting fact: only now the speed of films has approached the experimental films of Russian futurists of the 1920s, almost unknown to the general public, but very respected by specialists in the field of cinema.

At the same time, one cannot fail to note the desire to constantly jump from channel to channel, which is connected not so much with poor concentration as with the fact that more and more stimuli demand our attention.

4. Pictures became a new letter for us

One of the most ancient forms of writing was pictographic - the image of an object designated this very object. Having disappeared for several millennia, in the 20th century it was revived in the form of navigation icons.

Subsequently, pictograms evolved into hieroglyphs - a letter with a formalized outline of signs, where each glyph, depending on the context, encoded a certain word, part of a word or a complex concept. And although the drawing of the signs still imitated real objects, their meaning could be completely different. So, for example, the hieroglyph "hills" in Egypt could mean a foreign country.

After a couple of millennia, ideographic writing is with us again. Now - as an emotional addition to written speech, more accurately setting the tone and context of the message. Emoji, stickers, memes - these are all new hieroglyphs. For example, the Quartz news app uses emojis and gifs to communicate with the user.

We communicate with pictures, building fairly complex narratives, since images often carry several embedded contextual meanings, like hieroglyphs used to be.

In any messenger, you can send GIFs or stickers instead of or in addition to messages, everyone uses emoji. There are both well-known sticker packs and memes operating in massive contexts (well-known films, characters), and niche ones designed for certain groups (programmers, journalists, Reddit users).

A well-chosen picture, relating us to a certain context, allows us to quickly and succinctly convey a set of emotions and express our attitude to something.

5. Information has become a building material for us

Technology has given everyone the opportunity to create, creating new information objects from scratch or compiling them from existing ones. Each piece of information is viewed by us as a brick that we can use to construct our own narratives and meanings.

A fragment of a film, a photograph found or taken independently, a screenshot of a correspondence - everything becomes the basis for new communications.

The needs of users are keenly grasped by software developers who have already written dozens of different programs and online services for generating memes, creating simple compositions and videos. Coub is a great example. This is one of the most popular services for creating your own viral content by compiling ready-made video and audio fragments.

We perceive information objects as bricks for new messages, and not as finished unchanging things. Any fragment can become part of a new semantic collage.

6. We read information in fragments and diagonally

We do not have enough time and patience to consume content inside and out. Research shows that netizens no longer read in the usual sense of the word. They "scan" the page, snatching out individual words and sentences.

The term "F-pattern" has become widespread - the principle by which Internet users often browse resources (increased attention to the first lines and a cursory glance at the beginning of the next). At the heatmap level, it really does resemble the letter F.

"Scanning" is not only about textual information. We rewind videos, movies and podcasts. As a result, the content read diagonally is created for this consumption.

This is expressed in the rigid structuring of texts, splitting the content into fragments, introducing navigation or the function of accelerated viewing in the video.

Many sites began to implement navigation into the player, marking iconic places in video or audio on the slider, or placing them in a separate table of contents. Some go further and try to create new (obviously Stories inspired) formats, like this one from The New York Times.

Nevertheless, thoughtful reading is still with us and, according to experts, plays a large role in the development of thinking.

7. It's easier for us to operate with abstractions

Everything turned into an interface. All information has become virtual. Physical media are a thing of the past. Now, instead of disks, books, cassettes and records, we have their virtual casts, concepts of information items.

Interfaces are moving further and further from imitation of real objects towards texts. The "Delete" button no longer contains the trash can, and the "Save" button contains a floppy disk, only words. We instantly correlate the written word with the effect it will have on the virtual object.

And the buttons themselves no longer look like buttons. Almost everyone knows how to style a simple hyperlink, almost everyone is a bit of a programmer.

8. For us, there is less and less difference between beauty and ugliness

Global access to the Web has made all users equal in distribution rights. Everyone can broadcast their own taste in the information space. As a result, we see the same amount of beautiful and ugly.

Now the key indicator is expressiveness and information capacity, not beauty. Our range of aesthetic perception has significantly expanded.

In search of new styles and ways of expression, designers are inspired by both modern technologies (a cartoon that uses random effects in working with 3D visualization programs) and the low aesthetics of mass software (this video plays with the style of early text and image editors).

What's next for us?

Already, the opposite tendencies are outlined - a return to slow consumption (Slow TV), digital detox. All this is a reaction to the development of technology that is too fast for a person. It is unlikely that it will become mainstream, but it will help us find a balance between online and offline and teach us the conscious consumption of information.

Each new round of evolution has its pros and cons, but people have always found ways to adapt to the changing reality. This is the very quality that allowed us to evolve from stones and sticks to spaceships and atom splitting. It is all the more interesting to observe how the information environment we are forming is changing us.