How Mr Orange Won
Below, I’ll share my theory of our most recent election results.
I was at UCLA in 2004. So we got relatively early access to this massive social media thing. But we didn’t foresee the way it and other services like it would cause attention deficit problems.
We focused on the pleasures — knowledge of friends activities, cool photos fast access to ‘information’, etc. The pros outweighed the cons that were not even in our frame of reference. However, in time, those cons started cropping up.
Twitter came out in 2006. Now we had an even faster, more information based way to learn about current events or personal state-of-mind-rands. Though, its shorter length meant of course, shorter attention span.
Now many people could communicate extraordinarily quickly with many other people. Of course, there those that adopted this to their advantage, for instance Pres. Obama harnessed this new technology in his 2008 win. But with any technology of communication warfare, both sides learn from each other and adopt what works.
Commerce also started investing in social media. Then, young people short of jobs after the great recession actually had a shot at getting entry-level marketing jobs using social media. But there was an intentional catch, early 20s kids like myself, and others, and the companies payingthem, were now driving social media adoption further, faster. As the years progressed in the 20XX years, I believe literacy engagement rates were going down. But again, we did not pay attention to the reduced attention-span problem these short-form types of information could and would bring.
Today, IG and then TikTok brings that to perhaps the most extreme short-form version of attention grabbing content. Its not like entertainment radio and TV wasn’t always in the mix to some level, but social media took content shortening and its effects to a max.
Reading long-form content was becoming more infrequent. People would increasingly cite Twitter in conversations rather than a newspaper or periodical. Therefore the lifeblood of cognitive effectiveness was slowing — especially “complex-content” reading.
Cognitive effectiveness requires a sustained focus of traversing forward in time and content, and recalling prior. We were atrophying in our ability to synthesize the past with potential futures. But we didn’t pay attention to the cost.
There are other contributors to creative imagination and remember atrophy — acute stress, fear, pain. So in the last four years, combine post-covid physical, economic, social stress, fear and pain with hyper partisan social stress, fear and pain… well, what does that give us. A recipe for attenuated memory recall and creativity, curtailing millions of people from recalling events of even a few years ago. Not only that, but inhibiting the necessary survival skill of envisioning what will happen next.
And there you have it.
