How Too Much Cognitive Information Leads to Eventness

27 July 2007 | Culture, Eventness, Internet, Marketing, Media | Comments

Adam Broitman’s new article on how virtual worlds can help create eventness and specifically how an encounter with a celebrity’s avatar counts or doesn’t as eventful — got me to thinking.

Eventness or sobytiinost’ might function as a more useful organizing principle for how we should think about media and advertising than something more blurry like engagement or something too huge to wrap a brain around like community.

Eventness, I think, is more complex and less easy to come by than mere synchronicity — the red band in the middle of the media pyramid — but it also isn’t as simple as explicit interaction.

For example, on Satuday my wife Kathi and I went with another couple to see “George Gershwin Alone” — a one man show by Hershey Felder — at the Geffen Playhouse here in L.A. The mere fact of its being live theater made it inherently more eventful than the episode of the BBCAmerica’s “Robin Hood” that I might watch late one night from my TiVo, but I’ve been to plenty of deadly theater. With Felder’s show, the eventful qualities included the hissy fit that one theatergoer had two rows behind me (an usher came to intervene) and the karaoke-like audience participation when, at the end of the show, the lights came up and we all sang Gershwin tunes together.

On the cognitive side, I think that something eventful has too much information to be encoded by the mind without some loss. This is related to what Freud called overdetermination, but I really think of it as something more like what the brain does overnight with the detritus of the day’s experiences, which is to say dreams. Freud thought that the stuff of dreams were the manifestations of subconsious urges, which is nonsense. The images you have in dreams are the result of stimuli experienced during the day or memories twigged during the day. (See J. Allan Hobson’s “The Dreaming Brain” []for more on this.)
The part that relates to not-entirely-conscious concerns and worries is the narrative that the brain improvisationally assembles out of those materials. The stuff you remember from your dreams is the stuff that the mind arranged into a narrative, the stuff with a plot spine, and you forget the rest.

This in part is why when you tell a story about an experience many times over the course of time the story eventually replaces the actual experience in your memory.

So, for an experience to be eventful the amount of information in the experience has to exceed our ability to encode it in any one narrative. Telling the story of George Gershwin Alone, I might talk about the plot. Telling the story about my viewing of the same show, I might talk about the bozo sitting behind me, but one narrative cannot easily contain all facts. That’s the mark of an eventful experience… something unrepeatable and excessive.

This does, I think, relate to Adam’s piece because it helps me to get at what I think we need to focus on when talking about the sort of celebrity-encounter virtual world experience you describe.

The excess, the eventfulness, happens in what ISN’T recorded for posterity. It’s not enough for one avatar to meet another avatar that happens to be worn by Rachel Leigh Cook. What makes it eventful is what’s happening elsewhere in the user’s life and consciousness that complements, extends, distracts or disrupts the Rachel Leigh Cook encounter. Cognitive oscillation of focus between the encounter and the context of the encounter is what will make something truly memorable.

I’ll be pondering this for a while, but I think that the improvisational and partial quality of what the mind does when encoding an experience into memory — when that experience is too complicated to be utterly and completely encoded — is a big part of what makes something both eventful and “memorable” in the workaday sense.