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.And the paperback revolution, by making inexpensive editions availableeverywhere, lessens the scarcity value of the book at precisely the very moment that theincreasingly rapid obsolescence of knowledge lessens its longterm informational value.Thus,in the United States a paperback appears simultaneously on more than 100,000 newsstands,only to be swept away by another tidal wave of publications delivered a mere thirty dayslater.The book thus approaches the transience of the monthly magazine.Indeed, many booksare no more than "one-shot" magazines.At the same time, the public's span of interest in a book even a very popular book isshrinking.Thus, for example, the life span of best sellers on The New York Times list israpidly declining.There are marked irregularities from year to year, and some books manage to buck the tide.Nevertheless, if we examine the first four years for which full data on thesubject is available, 1953-1956, and compare this with a similar period one decade later,1963-1966, we find that the average best seller in the earlier period remained on the list a full18.8 weeks.A decade later this had shrunk to 15.7 weeks.Within a ten-year-period, the lifeexpectancy of the average best seller had shrunk by nearly one-sixth.We can understand such trends only if we grasp the elemental underlying truth.We arewitnessing an historic process that will inevitably change man's psyche.For across the board,from cosmetics to cosmology, from Twiggy-type trivia to the triumphant facts of technology,our inner images of reality, responding to the acceleration of change outside ourselves, arebecoming shorter-lived, more temporary.We are creating and using up ideas and images at afaster and faster pace.Knowledge, like people, places, things and organizational forms, isbecoming disposable.THE ENGINEERED MESSAGEIf our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reasonmay well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at oursenses.Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence thatwe are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli.To understand why, we need first to examine the basic sources of imagery.Where dothe thousands of images filed in our mental model come from? The external environmentshowers stimuli upon us.Signals originating outside ourselves sound waves, light, etc.strike our sensory organs.Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a stillmysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images.These incoming signals are of several types.Some might be called uncoded.Thus, forexample, a man walks along a street and notices a leaf whipped along the sidewalk by thewind.He perceives this event through his sensory apparatus.He hears a rustling sound.Hesees movement and greenness.He feels the wind.From these sensory perceptions hesomehow forms a mental image.We can refer to these sensory signals as a message.But themessage was not, in any ordinary sense of the term, man-made.It was not designed byanyone to communicate anything, and the man's understanding of it does not depend directlyon a social code a set of socially agreed-upon signs and definitions.We are all surroundedby and participate in such events.When they occur within range of our senses, we may pickup uncoded messages from them and convert these messages into mental images.In fact,some proportion of the images in every individual's mental model are derived from suchuncoded messages.But we also receive coded messages from outside ourselves.Coded messages are anywhich depend upon social convention for their meaning.All languages, whether based onwords or gestures, drumbeats or dancesteps, hieroglyphs, pictographs or the arrangement ofknots in a string, are codes.All messages conveyed by means of such languages are coded
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