As 2022 begins we in Position Papers renew our crusade against superficiality! Our motto could be: “Fewer blogs and more books”. People are drowning in a sea of superficiality: ephemeral and over-blown news stories, unconsidered emotional responses to tweets which were in themselves unconsidered emotional responses to previous tweets, and half-baked opinions whose worth has been greatly inflated by online echo chambers. We are seeing the effects of this particularly in our increased tendency towards entrenchment in our views on almost all matters socio-political. It was Aristotle – in his The Politics – who remarked that man was uniquely political among all the animals. Where animals can only manifest through noises emotional reactions to stimuli, man has the power to rationally identify and understand what is good and and what is evil, and importantly the power of language through which to communicate these thoughts to his fellow man. It seems, however that our dialogue (especially online) has reverted to the superficiality of animal barks, grunts, and dare I say it, tweets.
Ironically this superficiality masquerades as worthwhile information. The American political scientist Herbert Simon once wrote: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
Bishop Barron in his article here this month, “Thou Shalt Concentrate”, asks why people in the past had attention spans up to long epic films like the Ten Commandments, or novels from the likes of Dostoevsky or Dickens, despite the absence of bells and whistles. Now, on the other hand, “Everything has to be fast, easily digested, simple to understand, black and white – because we have to get clicks on our site, and it’s a dog-eat-dog world. What worries me is that an entire generation has come of age conditioned by this mode of communication and hence is largely incapable of summoning the patience and attention required for intelligent engagement of complex issues.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
reviewed here by James Bradshaw gives very insightful explanations of some of the mechanisms behind the increased superficiality of US media outlets: the fact that US journalists increasingly come from elite backgrounds, have very little contact with the reality of life at the coal face, are almost entirely left-leaning, and seek populist online engagement at the expense of substance.
Perhaps at root of our plunging into superficial news, opinion and titillation is a flight from transcendence. Margaret Hickey’s review of Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey’s Why We Are Restless contains the observation that “in seeking immanent happiness in diversion, busyness and projects, large or small, while rejecting the transcendent, whether tacitly or explicitly, they [people] are denying the reality of the very selves they are seeking to satisfy.”
“Launch out into the deep!” So Jesus commanded his disciples one morning on the Sea of Galilee; encouraging them to leave the shallow water by the shore for the more challenging, but fruitful deep waters. We could apply this divine injunction also to our reading in 2022: “Fewer blogs and more books”! And incidentally, if you do come across interesting new books which you think might be worth our reviewing in Position Papers, please do let us know. We are always on the look out for new titles.
I would like to finish by wishing all our readers a very happy, well-read, new year.