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Rick Prelinger’s
“Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 5″

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

The Boston Globe took a look recently at the ever-shrinking sound bite.  Digging into the history of the practice, the article argues that the trend towards shorter clips of political speech isn’t just older than you’d think – pre-dating television and even radio – but that it’s not necessarily an indicator of a shallower political discourse.

According to a new article in the academic journal Journalism Studies by David M. Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier, both professors at the University of Nevada, newspaper quotations evolved in much the same way as TV sound bites. By 1916, they found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892.

According to Daniel Hallin, during the 20 years between the elections of ‘68 and ‘88 the average sound bite dropped from forty-three seconds to nine, all well before Twitter!  The reason for this isn’t a sudden loss of IQ in the media and public discourse, but rather a trend away from publishing lengthy, verbatim excerpts of speeches in preference for analysis and contextualizing of the candidates’ claims:

Meanwhile, reporters, influenced by Vietnam and Watergate, were becoming more skeptical and more cynical. It all added up to a more active journalism — which meant, on TV, a journalism that was more interested in exposing and analyzing political image-making than in passively transmitting those images.

Say what you want about what replaced the footage of politicians, but chances are you wouldn’t want to let them go on as long as they’d like.

(via Kottke)

Google’s new Ngram Viewer is a graphical interface for looking at the frequency of words over time in the several million books scanned into their database.  As a publicly mine-able data set, it’s huge and ripe for exploration with 500 years’ worth of published books spanning several languages.  And while it may seem a simple ‘just so’ kind of information to be able to call up how often a word was used in a particular year, the lives of words can often illuminate historical and cultural trends in surprising ways.

A paper published by researchers who helped develop the project (and summarized by Discover) rounded up a few interesting findings.  One delectably recursive tidbit they mentioned was that a search for years (ie. 1865, 1990) can show the historical efforts focused on particular eras and the extent to which those years remain part of present day discussion.

They found a general trend each individual year follows: a spike just before the year followed by a downward trending long tail as it recedes into history.  They also, however, noticed a trend amongst that pattern: higher peaks with shorter tails.

When the team looked at the frequency of individual years, they found a consistent pattern. In their own words: “’1951’ was rarely discussed until the years immediately preceding 1951. Its frequency soared in 1951, remained high for three years, and then underwent a rapid decay, dropping by half over the next fifteen years.” But the shape of these graphs is changing. The peak gets higher with every year and we are forgetting our past with greater speed. The half-life of ‘1880’ was 32 years, but that of ‘1973’ was a mere 10 years.

So, at a cultural level, we can see a developing ‘presentism’ in which the year we’re currently inhabiting takes on great significance, but is more quickly forgotten once it’s passed.