Originally
appeared in the Boston Book Review
James Gleick: On Speed
James Gleick is the author of "Chaos: Making a New
Science," and "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman."
His new book is "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything".
We have learned a
visual language made up of images and movements instead of words and
syllables. It has its own grammar, abbreviations, cliches, lies, puns, and famous quotations. Masters of this language are the artists and technicians, Muybridge descendants, who create trailers for
movies and thirty-second commercials and
promotional montages of film clippings. And we in their audiences
are masters, too, understanding the most
convoluted syntax at a speed that would formerly have been blinding.
"Faster: The Acceleration of Just About
Everything"
HB: What do you
think someone from an earlier generation, even an earlier television
generation, would see if they saw, say, an MTV video or a rapid fire ad?
JG: I think they
would see a sort of blur. They would see something that's just not quite
comprehensible to them. As the great film director Barry Levinson points out,
in the past, television commercials were like sagas, like epics, compared to
the commercials of today. There would be one shot and someone talking into a
camera for 60 seconds. Now, it's a thirty second spot with twenty or thirty images,
or forty images less than a second long. It's right at the edge of
comprehension. In a way, the makers of those commercials are involved in the
science of perception. Their stuff has to work or they're dead. They know when
we understand and they know when we get bored.
