Effective Speaking: Keeping Attention

Back in the days before Gutenberg, it took months or years for a few dedicated scribes to create a single copy of a single book.  A literate medieval person, provided he or she was not interrupted by the Inquistion or bubonic plague, could probably read the book as fast as your typical modern high school student.  The problem was not finding time to read, but finding enough reading to fill the time.  Information was a seller’s market, and books were considered far more valuable than, say, peasants.

But now it’s difficult to imagine how we could possibly find enough attention to devote to all the information we generate.

60,000 new books in the US every year; 300,00 worldwide

18,000 magazines in the US

20 billion pages of editorial content on food and nutrition alone

400,000 scholarly journals

15 billion catalogues delivered to US homes

87.2 billion pieces of direct mail to US homes in 1998

40,000 different items (SKUs) offered by the average US grocery store

And yet, the average household only buys 150 SKUs per year

Suffice it to say: we live in the age of information.  The problem we have is not finding enough information.  Our problem is collecting it, organizing it, analyzing it, and taking action on it.

And here is Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize winning economist, speaking about the relationship between information and attention:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.  Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

When you consider that our listeners are drinking information from a fire hose,  we ought to study what the great communicators have done in the past, and what recent research says about human attention.

After all, what’s the point of talking if they’re not listening?