My little brother was born into a world where the internet already existed. A world where all the information in the world is available at your fingertips. I can find out in 15 minutes what it took a few days to find out a few decades ago. So with all this information that we have, we cram in more and more and more. You can open yahoo.com and see how they cram in so much into just one page.
Of course, having a whirlwind of data isn’t always the best either. There’s always a thing called whitespace.
Whitespace
When you have too much information at a time, your brain won’t be able to process all of it at once. It needs space between information. For example, that pause people make after saying something important. Or the way a webpage looks so so soooo much better when everything useless is taken out and you have the minimum to see.
One reason why people like the facebook layout is because it doesn’t cram too much on the same page (or at least that’s true if people don’t have a bunch of apps). By spacing the columns of information and limiting the information that gets there in the first place, you can better appreciate and concentrate on what you DO have on the page.
Put large blocks of space in between the blocks of text and things look much better.
Learning whitespace
So I think that we might need learning whitespace too for the same reason. Learn 3 things in half an hour and you’ll walk away with all 3. Learn 48 things in a half an hour seminar and you’ll still only walk away with 3. You might have written all 48 down but in the end you’ll only grasp the overall concept of all 48 and not the individual concepts of each.
So we need learning whitespace. And that’s when I realized what storytelling really does.
I’ve always been a believer that the best way to get information across is to tell a story. Our mind has evolved over thousands of years of oral storytelling to accept stories as the best medium to send information across generations.
A story (a well told story) compresses information into the format that’s best to learn in. Data like dates and names are spaced properly, with the story parts in between to catch your attention again. So you get a bit of info, then while you’re processing it, the author catches your attention with a little story before going on to the next bit.
Books should only have a few major points
I always complained that those hundred ringgit books would only have 3 or 4 main points in a book. Sometimes only 1 point in the whole book! Now I realize maybe it’s better that way.
Of course this only goes for books that aren’t story books in the first place. Because any book that wants to get a point across should always use stories to do it.
So…
Whenever everything looks too cluttered, just add a little whitespace.