Sriram Subramanian
Sriram’s writing pursuits started at the age of six, when he faithfully wrote weekly letters to his mother (an English teacher); she marked them for grammar, punctuation, spelling and sentence construction in red ink. His favorite authors include Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Dostoevsky, The Bronte sisters, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, PG Wodehouse, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry.You can reach him here.
His debut novel can be bought here. The cover is so awesome that I couldn't help sharing it.
Deer, Predators, and Information Overload
Sriram Subramanian
I’m a nut about structuring.
Specifically,
organizing one’s thoughts and ideas logically—grouping, classifying and
categorizing—before putting those ideas out in any form of communication, written
or verbal. The concept is very simple—when a writer (or speaker) structures his
thoughts, the reader (or listener) gets the message with the minimum of effort.
Further, there is little scope for ambiguity—different readers won’t go away
with different conclusions. The reverse is true when the writer just puts his
thoughts out as they occur to him, which is usually in an unorganized dump.
(That’s my day job, by the way…training people on stuff like this.)
I’d once
written an article on this subject (in a blog, now sadly only accessible to our
overlords in Google) and it generated some debate. One responder suggested that
with the advent of real time communication technology (e-mail, SMSs, WhatsApp
and so on), the cost of not ordering thoughts was minimized. If the writer
missed something, or was unclear, the reader could simply request and receive a
clarification, at virtually zero cost / effort.
This article
is a response to that line of thought, which seems to be quite prevalent (and
popular) today.
Yann Martel,
the Booker-Prize-winning author of the Life of Pi (of course, there’s a
literary connection!) suggested an outline of a fascinating analogy in an
interview many years back and it stuck in my mind. Subsequently it seems to
have vanished from the public domain (Googling yields no results at all). Based
onmy visit to the Serengeti some years ago, I have taken the liberty of
embellishing the original with my limited additional knowledge of the behavior
of antelopes. So here goes…
Imagine a
deer (say a Thomson’s gazelle) in the grassland. As far as his eye can see, the
land is flat; the plains endless, interrupted only now and then by a line of
short, stunted bushes, or the occasional baobab. He grazes contentedly, though
always with his ears cocked up and his nose on high alert, ready to respond to
the slightest hint of danger. Now, there are lots of predators on the same
grassland – lion, cheetah, leopards and hyena. How does the deer survive? With
the exception of the cheetah, the deer can actually outrun them all over a
reasonable distance, given his low body weight. However, all these predators
are capable of powerful bursts of acceleration, which make them faster over a
short sprint.
The deer’s
survival mechanism is a very simple one. At any point, the deer maintains a
‘circle of safety’ with respect to any predator. Imagine the deer at the center
of the circle. His signal reception mechanisms (power of hearing, ability to
detect predator scents and strange vibrations in the ground) have over millennia
been synchronized with the safe radius. His signal reception limits equate with
the minimum distance he needs to maintain to outrun a predator. If a lion moves
into this circle, the deer is able to pick up the signal, process it (checking
if it is a harmless or a dangerous signal), recognize the danger and take
corresponding action. The usual response would be to move away by a similar
distance, so as to maintain the safe distance. Any closer, and the lion would
get him because of his short-sprint advantage.
(As an aside, lions counter this by
hunting in pairs or threes, usually one lying hidden in the bush, while the
others approach from the opposite end to nudge the deer in the direction of the
one lying in wait. The reverse counter is provided by deer staying in herds—their
effective radius increases, and they seek safety in numbers—statistically their
chances of individual survival go up, though the lions would always get one or
two, each time)
Now imagine
this deer suddenly has access to modern communication technology. Say someone
clamps a pair of headphones or RF antennae on the deer, so that now, magically,
the deer can pick up signals at twice the original radius. Theoretically, this
should be good for the deer, because there might have been some instances when
a deer’s signal detection radius proved limiting (and fatal!)—say there was an
unusually fast lion just outside the original circle. With better technology, the
deer should be able to react at much greater distances.
What do you
think will happen?
What will
most likely happen is that the deer would go nuts.
Earlier, the
deer would ignore all signals outside
the circle, good or bad. Now the deer would go this way and that, as he
responds to each movement of a predator outside the original circle, even if
most of these movements pose no incremental danger to him. He would probably
fall down out of sheer exhaustion. Not a moment’s peace left.Unless of course,
the reception technology was combined with additional information processing
capability—i.e. the deer also had double the brain he does, which he doesn’t.
The point is
this—as humans, there are physical limits to the amount of signals /
information we can deal with, without going nuts. The explosion in the last two
decades is seriously worrying—on an average day, we watch TV, read news, check
FB multiple times, respond to every WhatsApp ping (and boy is that irritating),
get Twitter feeds, check out Instagrams, get SMSs, respond to so many calls,
get office mails everywhere, anyplace, anytime. Our reactions are not
dissimilar to the hypothetical deer.
Imagine you
and your friend agreed to catch a movie at the theater just 20 years back, when
there were no cellphones. (Sorry, millennials—you’ll just have to imagine this
world. Think it’s Westeros, for instance) Presumably you would have agreed to
meet outside the ticketing office, say 15 minutes before the start. If one of
you got delayed, the other would have a coffee, watch the crowd, look at the
posters or queue up to get tickets. Basically, wait patiently. And you know
what, 9 out of 10 your friend would turn up in time for both of you to catch
the show. Worst case, you’d be a few minutes late.
Contrast
with the situation today – how many communication flows would happen within
those 15 minutes—“I’m running a bit late / stuck in traffic / where the #$%%
are you…” and so on, across 5 different apps and devices.
For all our
endeavors, there is a period of planning and a period of execution. While the
need for course corrections during execution is self-evident, it is also highly
desirable that we have a frozen planning period—i.e. a period where we will
continue executing the original plan, despite new information coming in. All
corrections should be made beyond this period, which will in most cases
correspond with a safe-holding zone, where we recognize, process / interpret
and decide corrective measures. We shouldn’t be in a purely reactive mode and
throw the planning / holding periods out, just because our reaction abilities
have advanced manifold. The same applies to the need for original structure in
communication—we can leave it to back-and-forthing, but the long run costs will
be significant.
It is of
course entirely possible, that the human brain adapts to our new situation and
its processing power increases manifold, thereby enabling us to get all the
benefits without incurring the costs.
Just
yesterday, I flew from Delhi to Pune, and my flight landed on time, at around
11 PM. The wheels had barely touched the tarmac, when everyone’s cellphone was
out, flight mode off, and a hundred conversations started all at once.
‘Flight’s landed. No, we’re still taxi-ing. 20 minutes lagega. I’ll call you once I get the baggage. Then you start from
the place you’ve parked (illegally) and pick me up. Etc. Etc.’
Outside the
terminal, utter chaos reigns as everyone tries to time it to save those two
minutes—the net effect is everyone probably spent 10 minutes more than they
would have if nobody had called anybody. If our brains are really getting
better, I’m seriously scared the only way I have to explain it is I’m getting
more brain dead as I age.
I’m no
Luddite, though I am a relatively late adopter of new technologies. There has
been much that is good achieved in the last two decades, and there’s no going
backwards. However, I see signs of deer fatigue around me all the time –
increased stress, reduced attention spans, loss of patience, inability to hear
out a complex argument and so on. Any suggestions on dealing with this are
welcome.
(If you
asked me for a specific suggestion, I’d say, switch off all those devices and
pick up a good book. Paper book. One with pages that turn, which you can touch,
smell, feel and place gently, in its place, in your bookshelf.)
