Destructive Distraction
A fascinating little book came out in 1985 that would blow my mind when I read it sometime later in the 1990s. It was media professor Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which presented a profound critique of news media, at least as they were in the 1980s.
The book was a compelling summary of criticisms of the electronic news media up till then: radio, television, and the cable and satellite expansion of television. Postman’s take was that of a neo-Luddite in many ways, since he himself refused to consume any of the electronic formats, or even to use a personal computer. He theorized that the new technologies represented a system of entertainment pretending to be real news, fooling us into political paralysis, as we prioritized the frivolous over the serious. Newspapers and other print publications were what he considered to be smart and sensible by contrast—presumably not including photo-heavy tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines.
Arnold Kling recently revived the Postman thesis in his own essay “Distracting Ourselves to Death.” He described how the constant amusement that Postman once condemned has since expanded to become more ubiquitous, allowing us to lose track entirely even of our own biological imperatives. The nub of the matter, as Kling sees it:
[We can classify tasks] as urgent/not urgent and important/not important. Urgent means it grabs you. Important means that it really matters in the long run. [The] challenge is to spend more time on the tasks that are important but not urgent and less time on the tasks that are urgent but not important.
Social media use algorithms to make us believe passing digital media spasms are of the greatest urgency at any hour of the day or night. Social media elevate the trivial to the central focus, while making us feel like our immediate interaction with the trivial is not only essential, but that our engagement will help to shape events. The interactivity gives us the illusion of having some influence or control.
Meanwhile, control is the thing each of us has the least of when it comes to the things elevated by algorithms to an urgency. The distractions strike our brains as central, as something we can do something about. While obsessing over the distractions, we lose control of the things around us, bit by bit, imperceptibly. For instance, we lose the ability to concentrate on things that take longer than a few minutes of undivided attention.
The question for which there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer: What, if anything, is there that we can do about it?
Eeek!
Hello Everyone, home from work today....had a rough night.
I am too busy trying to solve the non existential problems I have, to spend much time on the existential ones....though normally I spend too much time on them.
I am online a lot, but, unless it is about animals or something fun, I don't follow algorithms...