SeevsPlace · Commentaries

Danger Will Robinson! Information overload imminent!

While browsing through Brian Donohue and Terry McKenna’s great blog, DailyRevolution, I came across this excellent 9-minute video by journalist Maggie Jackson on the “Erosion of Attention”:

Maggie Jackson is the author of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. She’s really worried about the excess of information in today’s world, in particular on the internet. How can we really know what’s going on while skimming the surface? How difficult is it to go in depth to gain real understanding? Are we losing the ability to focus? She believes we are and that this is presaging a coming dark age. Wonder if I’ll be around to see it? I doubt it, but then things do move fast.

Charles Pierce I hope does not nail it again with this little paragraph out of Altercation, but it may be true, it may be so. Somebody say it isn’t so!

I have no hope for the next 56 days. None whatsoever. Reality’s relevance was lost somewhere between Invesco Field and the Xcel Center. We’re going to get lofty post-partisan dreariness from both presidential candidates, and a vicious 1992 culture-war brawl under the radar, which will be thoroughly deplored in public by the people who profit from it most. I shouldn’t have to watch Karl Rove tell me about the American people and how they vote. I should get to watch Karl Rove being hauled off in chains to Danbury. The major television networks will curl up into a ball roughly five minutes from the start of the first presidential debate. The whole campaign is now going to be conducted on the level of pure mythology. If they had any intellectual honesty whatsoever, the people on TV would dress in white robes and divine the campaign through the movement of waves and the burning of laurel leaves. For a minute back in the spring, it seemed like the country was ready to admit to itself that it poisoned itself with bull***t over the past seven years and was prepared to issue itself a corrective. Not any more. We’re back to “personality” and “character” and “narratives” and all the other stuff that keeps anyone from thinking about what’s really at stake here.

Karl Rove in chains to Danbury — now that’s a good idea.