Time Compression: It’s Gaining on Us

When television motor mouth John Moschitta recorded “10 Classics in 10 Minutes” last year, his rapid-fire summaries of “Moby Dick,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Oliver Twist” and seven other famous novels sounded like an Evelyn Wood speed-reading session gone haywire.

The promo promised “the world’s fastest-talking man reads the world’s greatest books.” It rationalized: “So many books, so little time.”

The recording, of course, was a gag. But “time compression” in our culture isn’t. It is at the heart of our changing relationship with the clock. And, warn some experts, its consequences could be dire.

Most people are introduced to time compression rather innocently. About this time every year, nature starts cramming daylight into fewer hours. Long before “The One-Minute Manager” made best-seller lists or McDonald’s made fast food, time compression was a natural phenomenon known to occur in moments of emergency, in flights of fancy and during intense concentration.

“Time itself can’t be compressed,” says David S. Landes, chairman of Harvard University’s history department. “It is . . . an artificial concept which we measure in uniform units. Time itself never speeds up or slows down. What speeds up or slows down is our perception of what is happening.”

Landes, the author of the 1983 book “Revolution in Time,” says most people don’t pay much attention to the subject but they do experience it, often differently.

“Young people think time is passing more slowly than old people,” he says. “Perhaps because old people have less time left, they have a different perception than a young person who thinks waiting eight minutes in a movie line seems like forever.”

Other instances of naturally compressed and expanded time seem, appropriately, to occur under pressure. Edward T. Hall, author of the 1983 book “The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time,” says tales of “my-whole-life-flashed-before-me” in the face of death and emergencies suggest that altered perception of time can serve as a survival mechanism.

He recalls the story of a Navy test pilot who realized after takeoff that his plane wasn’t gaining power: “The eight-second scenario of how he dealt with the emergency and survived took 45 minutes to describe. If that capacity to expand time . . . had not been built into the human species, it is doubtful the human race would have survived.”

Scientists, however, are uncertain how nature alters time sequences. Hall speculates that emergencies or critical situations can short-circuit the neurotransmitting circuitry of the brain to bypass extraneous information and deal directly and efficiently with the action at hand.

“We call it reflex,” Hall says to simplify. “You knock a bottle off the table and your reactions and thinking speeds up to catch it. Only this is reflex of the whole organism.”

Enter the artificial manipulation of time. If moments of concentration can cause a paranormal experience of time, does an artificial compression of time then cause improved concentration and greater efficiency? By tinkering with the clock, can we unleash greater mental power?

Hall is doubtful. Time compression, he says, is a “matter of getting into phase with the natural rhythms of the human being. If the machine is tailgating us, it doesn’t succeed. One is threatening and the other is stimulating.”

Effect of Television

No technology has affected Americans’ time perception more in the last four decades than television. The first experiments with electronically compressing what is seen on the television screen began in 1980, on the heels of research showing that fast talkers are more persuasive and impressive.

“It doesn’t matter whether the talk is naturally fast, or is made faster by electronic techniques,” James MacLachlan, then a business professor at New York University, wrote in a 1979 Psychology Today article. “Fast talk scores better on all measures.”

MacLachlan’s own interest in compressed communications arose when he heard about electronic equipment for the blind, called Varispeech, that could play back recordings faster and yet remain undistorted in pitch by shaving about 201,000ths of a second off each sound. He wondered if the machine could be applied to other communications.

With a pilot model, he experimented with putting the squeeze on TV time. He had already demonstrated that speakers in radio commercials speeded up by 25% were rated more intelligent, knowledgeable and sincere than when played at normal speed. And he had documented that listeners found radio commercials “more interesting” and averaged a 66% greater recall when played 30% faster.

A Small Sacrifice

Other researchers had discovered that when lectures were played at twice their original “talking speed” (282 instead of 141 words per minute), audience comprehension dropped only 10%--considered a small sacrifice for increased efficiency.

Already convinced that “time flies when you’re having fun,” researchers also confirmed the opposite: Allowed to adjust voice variable controls of recordings themselves, most experiment subjects found listening more pleasurable at 25% faster than normal.

MacLachlan’s earliest attempts to shoehorn TV footage into a smaller fit seemed equally promising. Students watching videotaped commercials that had been compressed by about 20% remembered brand names 36% more often than those watching the unaltered ads--and they didn’t notice the speed-up.

But of several benefits promised by TV time-compressing--increased attention, retention--only one has materialized with the shift from lab experiment to the flickering screen in millions of homes: efficiency. Almost 20% of ads on network television today are compressed, says MacLachlan, who now teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

The purpose of ad compression: to save time and money in an industry where multimillion-dollar ad campaigns equate time and money. “They use it to get more TV commercials in,” MacLachlan says, explaining that the technique is commonly used for recovering a few seconds for adding local tag lines at the end of national ads.

Tom Robbins, vice president-director of communications at J. Walter Thompson, a major ad agency based in New York, says compressed ads are only one of several time-warping techniques used in TV and radio. Voice overlapping, for instance, has invaded New York radio commercials, “giving you the impression the whole thing is shorter because so much is crammed into it,” he says.

Advertisers have also cranked up the action on many ads with “rapid cuts, rapid editing, with dozens of scenes in a single commercial”--an ad style influenced by music-video production. “We believe very strongly that consumers . . . have become so adjusted to the essential barrage of images they are exposed to every day that they are actually able to absorb more information in a short period of time than, say, 20 years ago.”

But Jeremy Rifkin believes technology can wind the human clock only so tightly before springs are sprung. The author of “Time Wars” (Henry Holt, $18.95) claims America’s timepiece is now set to a faster-is-better ethos.

Like a Time Bomb

TV’s accelerated pace, he charges, is like a time bomb amid natural rhythms--the ones that enable a child to lose track of time while reading a story or a shortstop’s mind to slow the action of a line-drive and make the play.

“Speed was not much of an issue until about 100 years ago,” says Rifkin, president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends. “You were always constrained to natural speed, the speed of animals and the speed the wind could give you.”

Rifkin says that the computer is changing all that. “Now our social time is so speeded up and accelerated with computers and their nanosecond time frame and the electronic environment we’ve created that it bears only a faint resemblance to our natural time frame,” he says.

Nanosecond time, says Rifkin, is “a revolutionary change.” It is a billionth of a second. A snap of the fingers equals 500 million nanoseconds. “For the first time we are segmenting time below the realm of experience,” he says. “There is literally no way to experience the billionth of a second.”

Seeking Hyperefficiency

The motivation behind the nanosecond culture? “The ascension of the efficiency value” in a civilization that had no clocks before the 13th Century, no minute hands before about 200 years ago. “Our main time orientation today is hyperefficiency and speed,” says Rifkin. “Nobody challenges efficiency and speed.”

And yet efficiency and speed have their trade-offs, warns Rifkin. It’s something like the magazine headlines that read: “Free Time--Making the Most of It.” But were we to make the most of it, we would have no free time.

“In the long run, you get alienation, a sense of detachment, lack of participation,” Rifkin says. “The humanity is sapped out of the process because there is no room for experiencing, for savoring or for just being.”

While Landes agrees that “a lot of our technology is operating on much shorter time tolerances” and “those time constraints can be quite stressful,” he doesn’t see a nanosecond revolution as threatening society.

“The introduction of artificial timekeeping already took us away from nature and imposed a rhythm that isn’t that of the sun and so forth,” he says. “The introduction of temporal punctuation marks--when you go to work, when not to, and with that the concern with productivity and efficiency--has created stresses on everybody. . . . But I don’t think the nanosecond thing is revolutionary in that regard.”

The “saving tendency,” Landes says, is not to push precision to an extreme. He mentions that we are capable of measuring the winning time of a swimming competition far beyond the hundredth of a second--but consensus says we don’t.

“There is a small element of tolerance that is indispensable and will not disappear,” he says. “We’re dealing with human beings and not machines. . . . I can think of science-fiction scenarios in which a society is driven to the thousandths of a second--but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”