While eating breakfast recently, my daughter glanced at the cereal box in front of her and exclaimed, "Hey, look at this. They forgot to put something in a space."

She was referring to a large white area that covered the bottom two-thirds of a cereal box's side panel. Nothing was there: no recipe for crunchy corn flake cookies, no nutritional information, no fill-in-the-blank order-form for some free gizmo.

"It looks weird," she added. "Just white space. Something must be missing."

Although I don't know why there was a blank space on the cereal box (manufacturer's error, I assume), my daughter's reaction to the void spoke volumes: that a cereal box's exterior - like most everything we encounter today - seems filled to capacity.

To optimize space, our TV sets, which get bigger every year, allow us to watch more than one show at a time. And to give viewers as much news as they can, networks have added streamers of information to the bottom and the side of the screen.

Web sites also are crammed with information, and if we see a blank space, then something seems amiss.

I had a similar reaction recently when re-watching Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." Made in 1962, the movie contains a significant amount of time with little action and almost no sound, something today's movie directors would not likely do.

The movie's plot unfolds at an incredibly slow pace. In once scene, a distressed female character takes five long seconds to dial the telephone, a scene modern-day movie makers might portray through a split-second shot of the woman's hand clutching a telephone.

The movie, set in a rural California fishing town, depicts the horror one family experiences as killer birds overrun the village. The attacks come in waves, and in between, the family waits quietly in their boarded up homes.

There is little action and minimal conversation, and viewers spend an inordinate amount of time watching a silent screen.

Eventually the far-off pounding of the birds' wings breaks the quiet, and the screeching birds enter the living room through the chimney.

But the extended periods of quiet build suspense and typify Hitchcock's genius, although these techniques would not play as well with today's audiences.

More accustomed to plot lines unfolding quickly through brief snatches of action, we seem less tolerant of scenes played out in real time. Today, we expect both our movies and our cereal boxes to be crammed full, filling every moment with action, covering every white space with information.

A friend of ours from India who's been in the United States for more than 30 years once told me he thought Americans always seemed uncomfortable with silence. "Your culture is very busy, very noisy. In my country, silence is considered necessary to assimilate all that you take in."

Then he added, "Dhayana gyana." (Only in silence can the truth be heard.)