Thinking or Skimping in Western Society - The Editor’s Desk
January 10, 2008
If you look around the blogosphere for any length of time, you’ll find that 90% of the posts on most blogs are short snippets - often no longer than 300 words - that say “me too!” to a news item or post on another blog.
The practice of simply responding to other blog posts with your own is not acceptable when all you do is a paraphrase the other guy and throw in a link. Hopefully, at the least, you do actually paraphrase and don’t just copy & paste!
It is acceptable when you have some comment or expansion on the original piece that ultimately provides value to the reader. Many people won’t have anything real to add to simple news or another post, but if it genuinely inspires you to explore the topic further, then do it.
This very article is an extension of Steve Rubel’s latest post.
But whatever you do, don’t just say “me too.”
I know there’s no Blogging Content Standards Board and I sure hope nobody’s stupid enough to try and start one; but acceptable here is measured from a personal point of view: do you want to gain a readership through your blog? Then what’s acceptable from that perspective? This style of posting won’t help you get there.
The sad truth is that this lightweight, anti-intellectual approach is a symptom of our society. No, not just American society - Western society at large.
When you watch television, advertisements scream at you, demanding a few seconds of your time, engineered year after year to find a new way around people’s mental filters and immunities to them. Once they’ve got your attention, they throw a bunch of meaningless info at you in the remaining seconds.
When you read a newspaper, headlines that are carefully crafted to get your attention immediately suck you in to an article - and there’s nothing wrong with that, only half the time the article fails to deliver. We get used to reading the intro and throwing it away.
When you listen to music, unless you enjoy a select few non-mainstream ‘preserved’ genres, you’re used to the standard 3 minute tune. It used to be that 3 and a half minutes was the standard mainstream music time limit, but now people even have trouble listening that far without growing bored. Sad, isn’t it?
The reality is that we’ve been made like this. Years of conditioning by marketers and journalists and pretend musicians have put Western society in a position where 99 out of every 100 people can’t concentrate on something for a couple of minutes, and grok forbid if a fly were to land on their arm!
So those who create the media have created a society where Attention Deficit Disorder describes the international natural state of existence, and now that the Internet has allowed society to become the ones who create (some of) the media, we’ve got a case of even worse attention-deprived content.
At this rate, 140 words will become too long; soon enough we won’t want to read anything longer than 140 characters. Shit, we’re already there.
It’s not a change in culture’s pace; it’s an epidemic. It’s a disaster. That burst in technological development we had over the last century or two is gonna start to dry up back to its former pace - except that people back then weren’t so bloody impatient. I work from home much of the time, and I’m thankful for it because it means I’m on the road less - you want a test of character, watch the way someone drives.
If I look back on the statistics for this article in a week, I’ll bet that most readers clicked on to the next thing within a few seconds. Either I’m completely wrong about all of this and speed-reading techniques have really improved lately, or those people hardly got through the opening paragraph.
Society is experiencing a constant state of attention deficit and we’re building a huge attention debt, because all that lack of paying attention has resulted in poorly informed and considered work.
The problem lies in both the reading and the writing.
It lies in the listening and the composing.
It’s in the news gathering and the news digestion.
So what do you do about it? There really is no pussy-footing around it, you’ve simply got to learn some patience. But patience aside - though it’s got to come first - the act of consideration is important. Thinking things through is paramount. Asking yourself why you are doing something can cut out a lot of the rubbish you were going to expose your audience too.
Were you going to write something because you thought it might bring in some traffic and nothing else? Sure, we all need traffic, but consider the fact you’re contributing to a much larger problem by written-for-Digg articles. Wanted to write a song with a melody you hate but know will stick in people’s heads? Sure, every musician needs listeners but… come on. Where’s the integrity in that?
So ask yourself first and foremost: why?
Then it’s time to leave your brain to work out the details for a while, before you start the process of creating the item itself. As my colleague NDK Creative Artist says, the act of consideration should take the most time in the process; if you’ve considered it properly, there’ll be no trouble in creating the piece quickly.
Want to end the attention deficit calamity of society? Want to kill the “Lazysphere,” as Rubel called it? Want to put the three-minute pop song format through a slow and painful death? Then, since this is the era of independent media, everyone has to ignore the bad content and do a more thoughtful job creating their own.
The media is still a powerful beast, but if we - by which I mean society - really wanted to change this, we could.
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There is a name for this in media studies, Joel. It’s called morselization where you take something and turn it into a morsel, ‘a bite’.
Definition: # noun: a small amount of solid food; a mouthful
# noun: a small quantity of anything Etymology: c.1290, from O.Fr. morsel (Fr. marceau) “small bite,” dim. of mors “a bite,” from L. morsus “biting, bite,” neut. pp. of mordere “to bite”
In media morselization is the practice of taking a story and minimizing it so much that one learns nothing of context, and has no analysis or presentation of the larger story. This practice makes newsworthy items insignificant and often irrelevant and it is a cost-driven phenomenon, it’s expensive to run big news teams, and is one of the arguments for funding Public Broadcasting Systems (PBS).
It sets up the appearance of being informed, while failing to provide more than a taste of what’s happening. It is an American news style and I feel creates the scene for the erosion of democratic rights as we have seen in the USA over the last 6 years. It has lead to a rise of all kinds of blog reports to satisfy the thirst to know that sheeple don’t have, but thinking people do.
In blogs it also tends to indicate a paucity of thinking, and is more evidence of dumbing down, and I think about laying a claim to existence that is otherwise not felt (people are adrift and searching for meaning and value). A clone culture doesn’t have a great deal of imagination, same stories and songs and themes over and over again, with nothing new added to what has already been said a million times. Most are not even aware that they don’t have an imagionation and at best can only use it in very limited ways. Most glom onto something they like and simply emulate and think this is creative and original.
The Fargoth World Building Project has a system in place that pretty much breaks that mold and makes the intellect work and gets imagination fired up. But then it has a motto that supports and lays in a foundation whereby that is possible. “”We must take the ordinary and recreate it into something new, fresh and extraordinary!” For creativity that’s an excellent motto.
Now that won’t work for news and blogs, but what could be done is actually create some depth and significance and relationships, truly connect bloggable items to the larger picture and make them more relevant to people’s lives, without necessarily writing a book, but definitely adding value through information sharing.
A motto or guiding principle for such a concept in the blogosphere might be: Take the apparently insignificant or trivialized and reveal its true and useful meaning.” But then that involves the development of critical thought processes and most people think a critical thought is wrongful thinking.
As for the media I know that there is a cry and real pressure for change, but until the Fourth Estate’s critical political importance is re-established and the media no longer ‘embedded’ and infested with agents of the corporatocracy and their money; can’t see it happening. People often learn by example and through communication, and this whole moreselization process is what has killed most conversation and reduced it to a level of shallow meaningless discourse in most spheres; People make noise, but they don’t say anything.
“Patience is a virtue.” but who knows what those are any more? “‘Virtue’? Is that a word?” Yes, it is.
Consideration is really all about determining what it is you’re actually trying to do and create when it comes to art or any form of communication. But the pressure to produce for profit today, is immense. Its an industrial age legacy that lead to the myth of progress that Gordon Jackman is writing about. The Creative Function Principle can be applied to this meaningless blog phenomenon too.
To be fair, I think some of the “me-too-ness” is about indicating support, and finding some relief at the fact that there are others who are thinking as you do, observing what you observe, but I think you’re right, simply saying “me too” doesn’t indicate any depth or add value to the dialog, and if there’s one thing we need to do today it’s add value to our conversations and contribute to the collective consciousness, so that this whole notion of “waking up” actually occurs and the people get out of bed and address issues in a more meaningful way in their lives and creativity.
Great article, like to see more of this sort of poignant and perceptive observation from you..