Everything all the time

All media, the net above all, have a single target: permanence. Online shops don’t close for lunch or shut at six o’clock. Programs don’t stop. The electronic media are becoming part of the environment. Into something that’s ubiquitous and eternal. One upon a time we used to watch the evening news once a day to find out what was going on in the world. Today the flow of reports, entertainment and information is increasingly relentless.

The first medium to operate 24 hours a day was the radio. As for television, in the 50s and 60s stations used to close down between the afternoon and evening programmes. Once breakfast television had been launched in the 90s, TV stations filled in the remaining gaps. Young media consumers have never heard of strange things like the test card and the late-night close-down. Now even the era of the dial-up internet connection is coming to an end. The world is already seamless. Now it is becoming permanent.

Permanence is now shifting increasingly to programming structures and content. The news always used to be on at eight in the evening, but now it’s on round the clock. And so is everything else. The advent of permanence in the media releases us once more into the indivisible greatness of our lifetimes. With the new possibilities of time-shifted communication, the individual rhythm triumphs over the institutional. But paradoxically, the permanent supply of information can actually make us less informed. We feel insecure, like when there are too many clocks in a room. “Multitasking slows people down”, says cognitive psychologist David Meyer, summarizing the results of a study. “It increases the danger that we will make mistakes.” Constant change is bad for human information processing, and interruptions are worst of all. The human mind cannot concentrate on two things at once – and after an interruption, it takes an average of 15 minutes for us to focus our attention fully on what we were doing beforehand.

Technology can certainly help us to reduce the strain on our powers of concentration – and at the same time to spread them wider, enabling us to keep an eye on more things at once. But above a certain level – if we have to cope with more than five or six different project processes at once, for example – it becomes counterproductive. Experts recommend us to check our e-mails no more than once an hour, incidentally.