Blame it all on the short form

Astute or trained observation not required – everyone is now captive to the short form.  Small screens, sound bites, elevator speech, wisdom in 140 characters, messages for drive-time radio – they are now the currency of the majority.  Combine this intellectual attention disorder with an infusion of highly skilled rhetorical persuaders and you get extreme, shallow, views. The humans are smart, their phones are smart, but chronically under informed and seemingly content to stay that way.

Sometimes they will search, but only read bits on the small screens and never go to the pages after the first. The long form interview survives, but for a small minority.  The long form feature in print or film also survives, but for the few who are not continuously interrupted by device creep in their lives.

Little wonder that our politics are bollixed (technical term) and our public discourse shallow.  Persuasive rhetoric leads to cognitive capture no matter what fallacies are imbedded in the conclusions.  Fallacies, after all, require the time to dissect, analyze, research and debunk – no time for that. All argument becomes polarized (no time for nuance) and discussion of underlying facts become swamped in reductive and inductive errors – no time to construct proper arguments.

Here is to the reclusive lifestyle – we can revel in our large screens and long written presentations. The hubris of knowing you are either correct or well documented is of great comfort, but doesn’t solve anything.