drowning in entertainment: the age of distraction

“We're riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity's never blind or mute. So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves Stupidity's never blind or mute.

So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. ” - Deleuze In ancient Greece, there was a philosopher named Chrysippus, Sisphysus’ great great grandfather [absolute lie]. There are two ways he is reported to have died.

And we only care about the second one. Apparently, he was strolling about, until he saw a donkey eating some figs and he yelled: “Now give the donkey a pure wine to wash down the figs! ” He found this joke so damn funny that he laughed….

and laughed…. and then died from laughing too hard. That’s the type of self-love I’m tryna have.

Imagine being able to literally amuse yourself to death. Oh wait: is this the perfect segueway to introduce the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman written in 1985 with a foreword written by his son Andrew Postman? “I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information.

I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

” "Her breathing will then cease, and she will die of terminal bliss. " The books 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Adous Huxley are two famous books about mass oppression but they describe two very different types of oppression. In 1984, there is an authoritarian government that watches over everything you do.

Everyone must wear the same clothes, attend the same morning ceremony, there’s hardcore censorship, basically how Fox News thinks China still is. Then there’s Brave New World, a society where people constantly pop soma, a pill that keeps them in a state of pleasure. They’ve come to love and accept the brainwashing that happens in the baby creation factories.

And they have lots of orgies. While Orwell’s 1984 warns us about external oppression, Huxley’s Brave New World warns us about getting so used to our oppression that we participate in it ourselves. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

” Many people are self-aware of our declining attention span. As a kid, I used to be able to read and read without end. Even in high school, I could do my homework without distraction for at least a few hours.

Which made me an awful texter; I got lots of complaints about that. But now, within, like, half an hour of doing my work, I can feel my brain tingling to get a glimpse of my phone. If I’m not typing furiously in lectures to stimulate my brain then I’m bored to death.

Everyone knows it’s because we’re consuming short form content now - whether it be 15 second tiktoks or 250 character tweets - and we’re constantly surrounded by distractions like advertisements. But what if it goes deeper than that? Way deeper?

Way deeper . . .

"When my hand's on your grease gun . . .

" "It's just very sus, isn't it? " "It's a metaphor, Brian! " Metaphors are used all the time to help us understand one thing in the context of another.

For example, God is a bearded man in the sky, family is a tree, time is a clock. Now some people might question that last one: the clock is not metaphor for time. Time really is minutes and seconds and hours.

But is it? Before the clock was invented, no one thought of time in these mathematically precise chunks. Even now as we experience time, some hours seem to zip by and some never seem to end.

But the clock has become so synonymous with time that people think the clock is time. Metaphors are supposed to represent things, but in our minds, we can accidentally mess up and see the metaphor as the thing itself. This is why media is so powerful.

Media is a metaphor for communication. The book is a metaphor for knowledge, music can be a metaphor for beauty, but media is so pervasive in our lives that we often mistake media as the thing that’s being communicated Whenever we watch a movie about love, it's a mere metaphor for love but people end up thinking love just is this character’s relationship. When we watch the news, it is a metaphor for knowledge but many people now think the news just is knowledge or perhaps even the truth.

The dominant form of media in society shapes everything: how we communicate with each other, how we approach topics, and how we literally see the world. ”Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence.

To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. ” A new medium is not just an upgraded version of the old thing; a car is not just a faster horse, a lightbulb is not just a more advanced candle.

It doesn’t matter that they were built for the same purpose. They are completely different from one another because the fundamental form of these objects have changed. Similarly, the computer is not just an updated version of a typewriter, the television is not just a moving version of photography: changes in the form of technology literally redefine language and public culture.

The invention of the car didn’t just make us move faster: it’s revolutionized how we plan our cities, how much we value nature, how we express our social status, and even has become a sex symbol. The form of every medium predisposes it to be used in some ways and not in others. I need to get a fork.

Hold on. [music] I can use a fork as a knife if I tried hard enough but its form makes it much more possible to use it for picking stuff up, not cutting things. Even though I could if I wanted to.

Bleh. I am talking right now. [wow sound effect] And with my verbal words and sentences, I can convey pretty complex ideas.

I can explain Hegel’s dialectic or tell you every tiny step in the digestive system. But can I still do that if my form of communication was using a lighter? Maybe if you gave me 10 billion years to spell things out in morse code, sure.

But realistically, no, I can’t. The form of a lighter excludes certain types of content from being communicable. But maybe the lighter is better suited for communicating other things like DANGER or I really miss the 2010s indie sleaze aesthetic!

Thus, the main form of our communication methods will favour certain types of dominant content. I feel like lot of people still think we live in a print society so text like books and articles and just words in general are our main form of communication. But I feel we’re either saying bye-bye to print being the main player, or we already have said goodbye.

What we more accurately exist in is a visual-audio society. [tiktoks playing] Americans in the 1800s were pretty obsessed with conquering space. #colonizercore They worked really hard to extend railroads and make them move faster but still, how fast information could move was limited by how fast transportation was.

Then came… the telegraph. Suddenly, information was free from the bounds of space: it’s like words could just float through the air from one line to another. With the telegraph, New York and Louisiana could both hear about an affair that happened in Texas in a matter of minutes, even though physically on land, New York is way farther from Texas than Louisiana, according to my very limited U.

S. geography. It created an interconnected country that was previously impossible.

But this kind of caused a serious problem: people were like woah, I love not being able to wait, I just want to hear more and more right now. Over time then, what mattered in the news was simply whether it sounded interesting, shocking or new. Telegraph companies wanted to send information as fast as possible.

The value of information no longer came from its usefulness in social and political decision-making. Think about how before we could talk to someone halfway across the world, newspapers could only report on local news - about people and events that actually had a personal relationship or effect on us. Oh my god, Johnny drowned in the lake?

Poor boy, I remember seeing him at the candy store once. The mayor raised our taxes again? Well fuck, let’s go protest outside of city hall.

But the telegraph wowed people with the speed at which information could be transmitted. Speed became this extremely valuable feature of information and so what mattered was how much information could be transported in the shortest amount of time. This began the true commodification of information as a thing.

We clearly see this today with journalists fighting to be the first ones to write about breaking news, people on Twitter spreading the hottest gossip as quickly as possible even when it’s about the absolutely most irrelevant things ever… This causes a constant flow of information, and more information, until actually important information gets drowned out in a sea of irrelevance. To understand how irrelevant the info we consume has gotten, Postman asks some good questions: “How often does it occur that information provided to you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? ” Does learning about which latest celebrity got a botched nose job actually affect how we live our day-to-day lives?

How many people, after reading about earthquakes and wars in a completely different continent actually take any action to help? “A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into ‘one neighbourhood,’.

. . but it was populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.

” These things give us something to talk about and to feel opinionated on, but most of information we receive is solely for consumption: rarely does it prompt action. “Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply.

” Intelligence becomes equated with knowing lots of things, rather than knowing about things. Trivia games and crossword puzzles actually were invented because of this explosion of irrelevant information. With all the information people were getting that was useless or unrelated to their own lives, we were like, welp, let’s invent a situation where this information can become useful.

The telegraph also separated information from context. In a piece of written text, sentences exist together. There is always context and continuity in what you read.

You can see visibly how the sentences relate to one-another. You are given time to digest what you read. But for the telegraph, slogans, headlines, and other one-liners became the form of information.

It conveyed this message that good information doesn’t need context. You don’t need to hear about the history or the possible implications of the information. And we barely have time to digest what we see and hear before we’re moving on to the next set of information.

I’ll watch an interesting video about class consciousness but then as soon as I scroll, I’m hit with a cute cat video that is completely detached from what I just watched and instantly changes my mind’s focus. All we get are fragmented statements like “virus from China spreads across the world, harming millions” but questions like why did it come from China, how did it spread, what should we do, are all up to the consumer to decide – and we then have to decide based on our own pre-existing biases because the producer ain’t giving us much to work with. I think this is what causes a lot of conflict online.

We fight over what things mean because they’re given to us without context. The lack of nuance I often see on Tiktok is dangerous. Like stop telling people here are 2 reasons why your boyfriend can never ever love you and then not explain the reasons at all.

I saw someone say that gen z makes fun of boomers for believing everything they see on Facebook but we literally believe everything we see on Tiktok, and…. like, I’m sorry but it’s so true for some of you. Not every statement someone says with confidence is true.

Constantly seeing things communicated to us in a visual format is also very different from a print society. Before, people were known for what they wrote. When you said the name President John Tyler, Americans would think of his written work or his oral speech.

The early presidents of America could walk down the streets without anyone recognizing them because no one gave two shits about what they looked like. Visual imagery wasn’t the dominant form of communication, so as hard as it is to believe today, pictures weren’t seen as the best representation of people. Now, however, when you say the names Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, even scientists like Albert Einstein, a picture of them pops up in our minds.

Even if their appearance is totally unrelated to what they do. Of course photos and paintings existed long, long, long ago, but to say we live in a visual-audio society is to say that photos and videos are replacing written text as our main method of understanding and constructing reality. And photography really succeeded in taking over because it's such a good complement to the telegraph.

The telegraph did open the world up to us, but it was like, "who the fuck are all these people? " Photography was able to give the unknown a sense of familiarity. It gave faces to names of strangers, representations of places that we never previously cared about.

“. . .

it created the illusion, at least, that “the news” had a connection to something within one’s sensory experience. ” Visual imagery is really powerful in this way. It’s really in your face.

You can’t help but have it impose on you. Reading about a soldier coming home from war can be emotional, but nothing compares to watching it happen with our eyes. Why is that?

Well, a main reason is that writing is propositional in nature: it always carries the potential of meaning. Whenever we read words, they exist in the context of being true or false. “The sky is blue.

My name is Olivia. I am 6ft tall. ” Even if we’re not consciously asking ourselves, "is this sentence true or false?

" We need to either accept or question each sentence before we can move on with reading. But pictures don’t leave the same room for opinions. You don’t judge whether a picture is true or false the same way you judge a sentence.

You can debate whether the sentence “olisunvia is 6ft tall” is true or false, but if you see an unedited picture of olisunvia being 6ft tall you have no choice but to accept the world as captured by the camera. There's no argument there. Imagine a written advertisement for a dentist like this: “If you need your teeth to be cleaned, pay us a visit.

We offer the best services in the country, including basic cleaning, cavity fillings, and wisdom teeth removal. We hire straight from Harvard and hire all our staff according to the 2020 dentistry handbook. ” Each sentence, you're left to wonder, how true is that claim?

Do they really hire from Harvard? Do they really follow the 2020 dentistry handbook? Is 2020 too outdated?

Compare this to seeing a visual advertisement like this: Images just don’t call on you to judge them as true or false; they are there to evoke feelings. You can like or dislike an ad, you can feel happy or sad or hungry because of it, but you can’t prove this image is wrong if it's unedited the way that you can refute this claim, “We hire straight from Harvard. ” Okay, so what has all of this been building up to really?

What is the type of content that our visual-audio society favours? "Do you ever give yourself this? " "What?

" "Like, just a time to be stuck? " "Like time to . .

. just sit and do nothing and . .

. " "Hm. " "Not really.

" There's nothing wrong with being entertained. I love being entertained. But the problem is when entertainment becomes the default form of all experiences.

“Entertaining” has almost became synonymous with “valuable” or “relevant. ” People have criticized the quality of my videos and other commentary creators because they are “too boring” which is to say that they are not worth watching, but I’ve never really felt that offended by comments like that? I think a lot of learning we do is not supposed to humour us or cause some rush of dopamine.

But unfortunately, there has become a natural expectation of entertainment in every aspect of experience. Court trials about awful cases like rape and murder have been televised for people’s entertainment, they're made to be so dramatic such that it feels like a soap opera. After presidential speeches and debates, news companies love to hinge on jokes, or witty one-liners said by candidates rather than the quality and accuracy of any of their real politics.

"Are you in favor of law and order? " "I am in favor of law you follow -" "Are you in favor of law and order? " The news is especially a great example of how entertainment is just assumed to be the form.

“even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to ‘join them tomorrow. ’ What for? One would think that several minutes of murder and mayhem would suffice as material for a month of sleepless nights.

We accept the newscasters’ invitation because we know that the ‘news’ is not to be taken seriously…” News shows make sure they pick decent looking people, conventionally attractive if possible, with good chemistry, music opens and closes the show, making the news seem more like a film or a play rather than information about the real world . . .

When we watch the news, a lot of stories get reduced to less than a minute. The quick pace of it all prohibits any real act of thinking. Online, people don't want to hear you say, "hm, let me think about it.

" or "I don't know. " Because those types of phrases slow down the show. It's not entertaining to watch people sit and actually think.

It's much more entertaining to watch rapid take-downs and quick reactions. "So if the family decides to stab them, it's okay to stab-" "They're braindead? Yeah, they want- " "Not-not braindead.

Let's say that you're comatose for a short period of time, say, 9 months. " "Say now, but, what is the person . .

. " [laughter, clapping, and cheers] How much does this contribute to people thinking that they're well-informed all the while knowing very little? Well, take the example of the war on Afghanistan.

It received literally constant media attention for years. So we can assume that most Americans at this time were very knowledgeable about the War . .

. right? Would most Americans even know the language the people of Afghanistan speak?

Any of the laws of their constitution? Or even the main points of their political and cultural history? “Nonetheless, everyone had an opinion about this event, for in America everyone is entitled to an opinion.

” "Do you think there should be rules about what is taught in school? " "Oh, absolutely. " And what wouldn't you like to see taught in school?

" "Criticial race theory. " "Critical race theory, as soon as I heard about that I'm like, why are we doing this? " "What is Critical Race Theory?

" "I don't know. I haven't. " "Right.

" Arguably, the most dangerous type of disinformation is that which creates the illusion of being informed when they’re really being led away from knowledge. Returning back to the news, also notice how newscasters are expected to recite everything with a straight face. Real people would at least grimace if they were talking about something as awful as a mass shooting but newscasters talk like this as if they don’t even grasp the meaning of what they’re saying.

"Check your panties. About 175,000 rice- uh, I think that was supposed to be 'pantries'. " And then after talking about seriously heartbreaking or impactful events like natural disasters, they hit us with a commercial break.

"Perhaps the only chance of survival in the case of a nuclear attack. Pat Couch, Channel 5 Action News, Dallas. " "Target proudly presents The Grand Opening Sale at its new Ridgemar store.

" All of this contributes again to the news being more entertaining than informative. It’s like, hey, here’s the updated death toll for the earthquake in Turkey, here’s a husband who murdered his entire family, but also did you know McDonald’s Spicy McChicken is back for a limited time? I recently did my annual rewatching of Catching Fire, as everyone should, and there’s a scene where Plutarch tells President Snow about how to contain the revolution and keep people distracted from political content.

How he described it was basically exactly how our news is formatted. "She's engaged. Make everything about that.

'What kind of dress is she going to wear? ' Floggings. 'What's the cake gonna look like?

' Executions. 'Who's gonna be there? ' Fear.

" Love the hunter games. Always so relevant. I can't whistle.

But I would if I could. We've been so used to just having a random-ass ad put in the middle of like, super serious topics that I don't think we really understand how absurd that is. Imagine if an author suddenly put an ad in the middle of a book.

And not just once but several times in each chapter. You wouldn’t even be able to take that book seriously. Like, imagine reading, “We are so thoroughly adjusted to the status quo that we naturalize human creations.

But first, H&M is having their biggest sale of the year! All fall essentials are 20% off. Sign up to be a member and earn points with every purchase.

Acknowledging the constructed origin of our norms is a necessary step to change. “ Now, I, as a serious writer, would never do that to my audience. By the way, this video is sponsored by Nebula, my streaming service for thoughtful videos, podcasts, and classes by content creators like myself and many others.

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Go check it out. Quick switches between content - like what I just did - both on the news and on every social media app sends the message that 1 minute or even a few seconds is a sufficient amount of time to care about something. Others decide for you when it’s time to move on to the next set of information.

This obviously affects our attention span. There’s a part of the book that when I read it made my eyes pop out because I just couldn't believe it. During the debates between Abraham Lincon and his opponent Stephen Douglas, there was debate where Douglas gave a three-hour talk with no break, people then went home to have dinner, and then they came back after for four more straight hours of talking.

People sat through 7 hours of political discussion in one day. And keep in mind that they didn’t have pictures or a flashy stage or music - it was just them talking. And they weren’t even running for a big position like President or a member of the Senate.

People just genuinely thought their political education was that important. Imagine feeling as though your vote mattered - what a wild concept. I don’t know anybody today who would be able to dedicate 7 hours of their night to pure speech.

Even if it was about something that they really were interested in. Our presidential debates today are 90min long, each person speaks an average of a few minutes per topic, and if you watch debates on social media, there are tons of digital ads surrounding your screen to add that extra visual stimulation. The average length of a shot on TV back in 1985 was 3.

5 seconds but I’m pretty sure it’s even shorter today. I don’t even remember when this became a thing, but having serious topics paired with random cooking videos or subway surfers or a simpson episode - - really goes to show that our attention span is kinda fucked. Bill Moyers, a journalist, once said, “We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.

” Interestingly, I think our inability to pay attention and to remember things partially explains the rise of nostalgic content. People in our generation love nostalgia, we eat that shit up, whether that’s romanticizing the summer of 2013 even though half of Gen Z was like 8 years old, or crying over the 3rd gen of kpop being gone even though there were literally fanwars every second, we can’t remember enough of the facts and context to assign anything past just a general feeling. And so it's easy to just think, "Oh, yeah.

I think it felt nice. " As a video essayist who tries to make educational content in a more entertaining manner, I’ve wondered a lot about how I fit into all of this. I undeniably put on makeup and try to look good in front of the camera.

I try to have as many pauses in my talking cut out as possible and try to make sure I include enough outside footage so that people don’t get bored staring at my face for like five minutes. I have ads that interrupt my videos and while I know people don’t discredit the quality of YouTube videos for having ads because everyone does it, I still wonder how it affects the perception of educational content on YouTube. Will video essays ever feel as serious as a written article?

Do I affect people’s expectations when it comes to learning outside of YouTube? The answers may be different for different people. For me, I actually find that watching a really educational and entertaining video on YouTube leads me to want to read more books and learn more outside of YouTube.

I’m not sure if this is the same for other people, you let me know. But even then, still, there’s this problem I always struggle with, which is, like, how much does my persona matter to everything and it’s like, how likable and attractive do I have to make me as a person, as a friend, as a “creator”, to make people think my content is valid? Will the visual form of video essays inherently make my image more representative of me than my words and ideas?

Cause I’m sure when people say “olisunvia”, the first thing that pops into their head is a picture of me, not what I’ve said. When people are represented first by their image, and not their work, it really changes how we evaluate people. TV commercials for example use athletes, singers, chefs, chess players even, to sell them as images.

It sends this message that no matter what your career is, you can always be used to entertain. This has especially freed politicians from actually having to do politics. Which I think is kinda scary.

Now they can attend comedy skits, or commercials, or even gaming live streams… they have become more like celebrities rather than educated leaders. Their appearance and “vibe” become much more influential in their election results than their actual policies. I feel like most people, at least in my generation or younger, know Joe Biden best by memes of him slipping up, both physically and verbally, "How would you say your mental focus is?

" "Oh, it's focused. " [chuckling] "I say it's- I think it's- I-I haven't- look. I have trouble even mentioning even saying to myself in my own head the number of years.

I no more think of myself as being as old as I am than fly. I mean it's just no, uh- I haven't observed anything in terms of- there's not things I don't do now that I did before whether it's physical or mental or anything else. " or they know Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau as the zaddy of world leaders.

Richard Nixon, a past president of the U. S. , once claimed he lost an election because his makeup crew messed up, then he told his competitor that if you really wanted to run for presidency, he should “lose twenty pounds.

” ‘News’ sites like Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan, Refinery 29, and Entertainment Tonight, make the lives and drama of celebrities “serious’ cultural content. Like oh my god you don’t know the year Kim Khardashian's sex tape was released? Are you even American?

I can’t believe you didn’t know Hedley got sent to jail. Are you even Canadian? I really hope other Canadians out there got that reference.

Please comment if you did. “. .

. the circle begins to close: Both the form and content of news become entertainment. ” Harry Frankfurt came up with a concept called “bullshit speech acts” which is when a speaker doesn’t care about what they say is true or false.

And I think this happens ALL the time now. Oh my god, Miley Cyrus wrote flowers about Jennifer Lawrence because Jennifer Lawrence had an affair with Liam Hemsworth when they were filming Hunger Games together! These kinds of statements are passed along because they’re fun to say but how much do we actually care about their truth?

The goal is to entertain people with this kind of “serious cultural” news, not to tell them exactly what happens. At least with a lie, it implies that the speaker knows and recognizes the truth as important, which is why they know they need to swerve around it. But for the bullshit speaker, they’re like, "eh I can maybe lie for fun.

Maybe I'm telling the truth. But let me just have fun. " "I promise you’ll get the best customer service of your life!

But I don’t actually care if you do – maybe you do get the best customer service of your life! But I’m just speaking to speak. " See, dictators only need censorship when they feel that the people know and care about the difference between serious news and entertainment.

“How delighted would be all the kings, czars, and fuhrers of the past to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest. ” Sorry for not posting a video last month. But here I am, back again.

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