How The Psychology of Time is Warped by Media and Novelty
Tom Womsgams, the fictional television executive in HBO’s Succession had a long history of embarassing moments. The shy kid from Minnesota often found himself out of place in the jaws of corporate America, struggling to balance his personal ambition with his complicated relationship with his wife, Shiv, the daughter of his boss.
But his genius comes in unexpected, unintended ways. In one memorable scene, he finds himself unprepared for a presentation at an important conference. In typical Tom awkwardness, he says, “The news is.. all things that are new. All the many news. The news” The audience is dumbstruck, unimpressed, and confused. Offstage, Shiv, a polished communicator at ease in the corporate world, shudders in embarrassment.
On its face, it feels like another installment of Tom’s corpus of embarrassment. However, if we take a deeper look at this comment outside this context, it contains a key insight: it’s the media’s job to tell us what is new. In other words, media is in the business of defining - and in some cases inventing, novelty.
This is much more than Tom stumbling through his words. In today’s real world media landscape, this perspective helps explains a lot. What it suggests is that, as the media landscape shifts, we don’t simply get news from different mediums, we get an experience of the world which is categorically different. Why? Because here’s the thing: the perception of novelty is what our brains use to determine the pace of time. If, as Tom suggests, the media determines what is “new”, they also, in turn, determine how fast or how slow we experience time.
To understand this in full, we first need to take a step back and understand where our sense of time comes from in the first place. Let’s begin with the psychology of time itself.
Why Novelty is Key to The Psychology of Time Perception
Time itself may march forward at an objective, consistent pace, but our psychological experience of time it isn’t so straightforward. As we saw in the case of Clive Wearing, time is personal. The speed of time, or at least how we perceive it, isn’t constant. Vladimir Lenin perhaps said it best, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Bored in a waiting room at the doctor’s office, time feels like it's crawling. But if we find ourselves immersed at a friend’s house party, time feels like it sprints by.
What exactly determines the speed by which we experience time? Ultimately, it comes down to our perception of novelty and change. Novelty is the yardstick by which our brain measures our sense of time. The more novelty we experience, the more we feel that we’re taking in, and the slower time feels. Time feels slow and dense when, say, we’re on vacation in a foreign land, and everything we experience feels new. In contrast, that same daily work commute that we’ve done countless times before feels like it goes by in an instant.
In one experiment by David Eagleman of The University of Texas, participants watched a video of a cheetah sprinting, and were asked to estimate the amount of time that had elapsed between two flashes of light that appeared on the screen. One group saw the video playing at full speed, while the other saw it in slow motion.
The results showed that the slow-motion group had a significantly less accurate perception of time. Compared to the full-speed group, they falsely perceived the duration of time to be 27% shorter. For them, time appeared to speed up. Why would that be? In the slow-motion condition, less is happening - there’s less novelty transpiring. Same cheetah, with those same spots, in the same Savannah.
In other experiments, images are flashed on the screen, and participants are instructed to estimate how long they appear. When an image has been seen multiple times already, you feel as though it only flashes for an instant. But when an entirely new image is shown, despite it being up there for the same amount of time as the old images, it feels as though it’s on the screen for much longer. As Eagleman distills, “If you want to slow down time, seek novelty.”
How Media Warps Our Perception of Time
With this in mind, let’s come back to Tom Womsgam’s “insight”: The news is all the things that are new”.
Think of a news company is like an inspector on a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt is the moving of time. And what’s passing along aren’t foods for packaging, or materials to inspect. Instead, it’s the world’s events and activities, in all of their amorphous form. It’s one big blob of nebulous chaos.
The inspector watches this chaos flow along, and their job is to declare, where the discrete events are. Time moves along at a steady pace, but how many events are coming by at any given time is up to the media to decide. Media is in the business of convincing people that certain things are new, and, therefore worthy of their attention.
In a deeper sense, there’s no objective definition of “new”, and no clear standard for what should be considered a “new event”. What’s new is fundamentally ambiguous. At any given time, some things are new and there are old things. What we consider new, are the things we feel are interesting and consequential to us humans.
When a media organization decides is “new” is more than just a journalistic decision; it’s a metaphysical one.
The Psychology of Frenetic Standstill
Over the past few decades, the pace of the media has steadily risen. The first big throttle came in the 1990s with the invention of 24-hour news. Competition increased, and networks had to fight tooth and nail to keep viewers glued in.
When there wasn’t a new development on a national story (such as the long-standing OJ Simpson trial), networks would convince viewers that there was other news happening everywhere and all the time. In his appropriately titled book, Warped Speed, author David Weaver describes this era as ushering in media sensationalism - head-turning stories of human tragedy and disturbing violence. And the more, the merrier.
The pace of the world’s events - mediated through the “news” - seemed to move extremely slowly. Lots of “new things” were packed into each hour.
At the same time, the pace of the world off-screen moved at a very different pace. Daily events stayed pretty much the same. The humdrum morning commutes, unchanging, went by in an instant. This presented a paradox. As they sat there on the couch, the world, in all its familiarity and routine, quickly fizzed by. But on their screens, time felt slow.
Author Chuck Klosterman described the transformation of TV in his book, The Nineties. He writes, “Something indefinable was changing about the way people processed history, including the history they were actively experiencing. The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was. Technology was advancing faster than the human condition.” (pg. 55)
It was a bizarre juxtaposition that our evolved primate brains had no preparation for. It began to appear that the world’s events were long and drawn out, but that life itself was passing us by very quickly. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa coined a term to describe this unique phenomenon: frenetic standstill.
Its worth noting that Rosa coined this in 1992, when the media in question was television, radio, and local newspapers. Compared to the pace of today’s social media - especially Twitter and TikTok, those world events, by comparison, moved at a glacial pace. If the 90s was a frenetic standstill, how do we describe our sense of time in the era of social media?
Photo by Nijwam Swargiary via UnSplash
This is part 1 of a multi-part series on social media, memory, and the psychology of time. Part 2 can be found here
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
References for The Psychology of Time and The Influence of Media and Novelty
Ben-Artzi, E., Marks, L.E. (1995) Visual-auditory interaction in speeded classification: Role of stimulus difference. Perception & Psychophysics 57, 1151–1162 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208371
Eagleman, D. M. (2008). Human time perception and its illusions. Current opinion in neurobiology, 18(2), 131-136.
Klosterman, C (2022). The Nineties (p. 55). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Hasson, U., Yang, E., Vallines, I., Heeger, D. J., & Rubin, N. (2008). A hierarchy of temporal receptive windows in human cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 28(10), 2539-2550.
Zheng, M. (2021, December). Influence of Short Video Watching Behaviors on Visual Short-Term Memory. In 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021) (pp. 1855-1859). Atlantis Press.
