The United States of Distraction and Soupe du Jour
To Ignore It or Combat It?
Real-time news has a “squirrel” effect [See the legendary animated movie Up for full cultural reference]. Momentum news starts as a little cigarette lighter, and grows to what James Comey, in his memoir, A Higher Loyalty, calls, “A forest fire.” Real-time is going from immigration refugee family separation that existed under Obama and Bush, to Justice Anthony Kennedy retiring and putting up in arms the entire ideological balance of the Supreme Court. “Momentum” news is drips of information over long periods of time; leading to a climactic conclusion or falling action, and the occasional instant shock-and-awe story involving one of the ‘seven deadly sins’ that creates the doctrine if it ____ [editor: bleeds], it leads or reads.
Recently, after the machine gun rapid fire of ‘political news’ for the week, a Facebook acquaintance of mine summed up his feelings, and the temperature of a significant amount of people, in the following manner:
I’m aware big things happened recently in the news. I’ve tried my best to ignore it all being honest. It’s not my strong point, I don’t understand politics and it’s evil loop holes and history, nor the way they run, and when I focus on it, all I do is increase my anxiety to isolation levels. So as much as I want to do my due diligence…. nope I can’t deal
After processing the post and appreciating the courage of honesty in an environment where vulnerability seems increasingly difficult, I posted the following reply:
I think another way of what you are saying, which is true, is that until events in their current state reach “critical mass” which we haven’t seen since Dr. King, the individual level of change is not enough when the collective is what Neil Postman calls the prophecy of Huxley, too busy “Amusing ourselves to death.” That is capitalism as it currently exists facilitates the United States of distraction. Until the collective is awake and acting in mass, individual change in the political realm is almost too easy for the nihilists. So to say it a third time our system cannot have change without critical mass.
In 2009, Comic illustrator Stuart McMillen, did a visual interpretation of Neil Postman’s book that knocked the dust off of the work and brought into the greater culture. The comic went viral and interest in the book surged, so much that it even got the attention of Richard Rohr O.F.M., who released an audio book called, “The Art of Letting Go” around the same time, discussing the comparing and contrasting postman’s now ever relevant observations on our obsessions with the prophecies of Orwell and Huxley.
Postman wrote, and McMillen resurrected to the online digital consciousness, while Rohr took it to the spiritual and religious community that we can now see with the collaborative efforts that the distinction made of Huxley, not Orwell, is shockingly correct. If knowledge is sacred for everyone to know, Huxley, Postman, Orwell, Rohr, and McMillen would certainly intend for the revelations of this exposition to reach far and wide. Let’s insert this into the boyfriend distraction meme for a different perspective:
We all must face the difficult understanding that this is the reality of western civilization. With mass media designed in its new epistemological resonation as typography 2.0 in the form of tweets, blogs, texts, GIFS, Reddits, YouTube rants, Medium articles, television talking points and the original print press, the culture of narratives and expression has no longer one version of the truth, even in the strongest academically cited formats. In the context of the internet, websites such as Snopes.com originated in 1994 to ‘fact check’ stories that took rabbit holes online.
As the previous centuries were tied to the age of reason, we are tied to an age of semantical nuance, hyper-partisanship in the context of communal ego’s (single but separate tribes in a two-party system) and an archive of information that competes to be the soup de jour.
No longer is the status quo for intellectuals a pursuit of who can be persuaded to my point of view, as Andy Crouch once wrote. Rather, the current status quo is some version of, “if you have not been persuaded to my point of view by now, I don’t have time for you and you are the problem.” This was ushered in by the mindset likes of José Micard Teixeira who in 2014 wrote the following statement that went viral from his blog as being said by Meryl Streep,
I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me. I have no patience for cynicism, excessive criticism and demands of any nature. I lost the will to please those who do not like me, to love those who do not love me and to smile at those who do not want to smile at me. I no longer spend a single minute on those who lie or want to manipulate. I decided not to coexist anymore with pretense, hypocrisy, dishonesty and cheap praise. I do not tolerate selective erudition nor academic arrogance. I do not adjust either to popular gossiping. I hate conflict and comparisons. I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. In friendship, I dislike the lack of loyalty and betrayal. I do not get along with those who do not know how to give a compliment or a word of encouragement. Exaggerations bore me and I have difficulty accepting those who do not like animals. And on top of everything I have no patience for anyone who does not deserve my patience.
Snopes was the source who confirmed that the post was originally written by José Micard Teixeira and falsely by him accredited to Meryl Streep. The mass virility of the quote resonated with people who feel and agree with José that a dismissal is a form of superior reaction to people whom we disagree than to continue the public discourse. While Crouch is right for any civil future of public discourse, it is ill-advised to follow Teixeira’s feeding and building on the binary, us versus them. The misquote distribution’s acceptance and ‘validation’ in spreading tells us volumes of the internet’s potential as a vast arena for misinformation for the driving of personal agendas. People want what they want to be true, instead of seeking out the truth for themselves:
Do we have a responsibility to present what we see as the truth? It seems as though we do. It is not as if it is a natural reaction to seek out a truth which could threaten our sense of familiarity, history, reality, and often, self-identity. The further question is begged; knowing what we now know, is living by example, enough?
Dr. King understood the only way forward was to carry all mindsets until they came to arrive at deeper levels of consciousness, that is new ways of seeing. Only the transformed mind can get to the action of progressive change. This involves a form of letting go. This involves the ability to listen precisely at the point when we have our mind made up, even in the circumstances where we may be convinced we are right (and we may be right) but the discipline of transformation at the mastery level is still always listening, unlearning, reproaching, adjusting.
In The Old Testament, the Jews came to a period where God had taught them to focus on “Just enough mana for today.” The media in the age of the internet, television, mobile phones and endless inter-connectivity to the always-on phenomenon, is interested in capturing just enough of your attention ‘for today’. Goals and agendas can be long-term, but today’s headline is a race, in a scourge of lesser headlines that get buried, yet can be repackaged or resurfaced in concert to force and change algorithms to trend and control the news cycle in favor of one parties ideologies over the other upon demand, especially on slow news days.
There are journalists, celebrities, and others out to make names for themselves. There are egos that convince us that only our worldview is right, and anything less or anything else is the enemy and must be destroyed at all levels. What better way then to tabloid style information in all resonating forms of currently distributed epistemologies? To cram all forms of media with enough of a narrative that ‘the persuasion of our neighbors’ (Crouch 2009) is spoon fed to our brains at the door, instead of sudden individual and isolated awakenings or crystal ball revelations at Woodstock concerts. The tweet forms as a typology to ignite a ‘true’ or ‘false’ response.
In internet typology, there is scarce and almost impossible room for non-duality by design. A mere ‘retweet’ can suggest agreement merely by the reality that it was retweeted at all. A retweet legitimizes a point of view, in the same way, video footage of criminals ‘immortalizes’ scenario, names, and dates into consumers psyches. Exposure becomes legitimization. It is why people opposed President Donald Trump meeting with the leader of North Korea.
Yet they too, are just people who produce information and consume it while not recognizing the influence of how those specific stories landed on those screens/pages/texts at those specific times and with what catch the authors want to duplicate and insert narratives back into the public discourse. These actions are what Andy Crouch calls and titled a novel after, which is applicable outside it’s Christian context, Culture Making (2009). The question for us, in the age of distraction, is can we afford or accept our current internet culture without pushing back in a counterculture of change? Until that collective awakening occurs at critical mass, history suggests to us individual change will not be enough.
Andrew Ross is one of those rare selfless individuals who contribute in whatever ways he can, writing, social media, mentoring, and more. We often under-appreciate them because we get comfortable in their reliability. Andrew donates his time and effort to the betterment of humanity as a humble servant, so far as to also be known as Pastor Ross. You will find much of Andrew’s professional work as a pianist throughout iMemberMedia productions.
iMemberTimes is the digital newsprint of iMemberMedia. We are open to submissions and new writers.
