"It took chickens almost a century to learn not to cross the road"

Jean-Philippe de Tonnac. Let's come back to the changes in technology that may or may not persuade us to leave the book behind. Today's media formats are definitely more fragile and less long-lasting than our wonderfully tenacious incunabula. And yet, whether we like it or not, these new tools are having a profound effect on our thought patterns, and gradually altering them from those engendered by the book. 

Umberto Eco. The speed with which technology reinvents itself has forced us into an unsustainably reorganization of our mental habits. We feel the need to buy a new computer every couple of years, precisely because they are designed to become obsolete after a certain time, and to be more expensive to repair than to replace. (...) And every new piece of technology requires the acquisition of a new system of reflexes, which in turn requires effort on our part, and all of this on a shorter and shorter cycle. It took chickens almost a century to learn not to cross the road. In the end, the species did adapt to the new traffic conditions. But we don't have that kind of time. 

Jean-Claude Carrière. But is it even possible to adapt to a rythim that is accelerating to this pointless degree? Take the example of film editing. Music videos have increased the pace of  editing to such an extent that it simply can't go any faster. You wouldn't be able to see the images. I give this example to show how a cycle is created in which a media format gives birth to its own language, which in turn forces the format to evolve, and so on, in ever more hasting and hurried circles. In today's Hollywood 'action' films no shot lasts more than three seconds. It's become a kind of rule. A man goes home, opens the door, hangs up his coat and goes upstairs. Nothing happens, he isn't under any threat, and yet the sequence is cut into eighteen shots. As if the technology is dictating the action, as if the action was in the camera itself, rather than what it depicts. 

Umberto Eco & Jean-Claude Carrière (2011). This is not the end of the book; (tr.P. McLean). 

London: Vintage Books, pp. 39-40.