Last night we were standing out in the front yard talking to the neighbors and Josh brought out his recent issue of National Geographic to show me something that I can't remember now. I noticed that there was an article about army ants so I borrowed the magazine so I could read about them.
The reason I wanted to read about army ants is that last fall, in one of my classes (Special Topics in Library and Information Systems), one of the theories we talked about was complex adaptive systems theory (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system...jeez I wish there were better encyclopedias free online).
Anyhow, what I noticed was that the ant article had about a page and a half of text and five pages of pictures. This is not what I remember about National Geographic so I read a couple more articles (which were very interesting by the way, one about hurricanes and one about the Fremont people who once lived and left cave paintings in Nevada). Sure enough, lots of pictures and very little text. So I got to thinking, I wonder if this change in the amount of text that accompanies National Geographic articles has occurred systematically over time? And if it has, does it have anything to do with the impact that improvements in communications technology have had on our culture? I've read studies that examine the drop in children's attention span as a result of TV, video games, and the internet. Has our collective attention span been reduced to the point where we don't want to read more than a page or so and would rather look at pictures (which, admittedly NG has always done very well with)?
There's definitely a research project there...
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