Researchers say that the chaotic, distracting mess of multiple information streams that is CNN and many other channels today isn't working. (Surprise!) From Kansas State University:
"We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don't have it on the screen," (journalism/mass comm. professor Tom) Grimes said. "Everything you see on the screen — the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast — are conflicting bits of information that don't hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message."
For their research, Bergen, Grimes and Potter conducted a series of four experiments that examined people's attention spans regarding complex and simple cognitive processes.
"The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content," Grimes said.
