Youre coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that

bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all

kinds of arguments, some of which dont always rank that high
on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads and Xboxes and
PlayStations information becomes a distractiom, a diversion,
a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment,
rather than the means of emancipation. All of this is not only
putting pressure on you, its putting new pressure on our
country and on our democracy.
President Barack Obama, 2010 Commencement Address at
Hampton University, Virginia
The trouble with todays snarky pipsqueaks who break off a sentence or two, or who write a couple of mean
paragraphs, is that they dont go far enough; they dont have a coherent view of life. Spinning around in the
media from moment to moment, they dont stand for anything, push for anything; theyre mere opportunists
without dedication, and they dont win any victories.
David Denby, Snark: Its Mean, Its Personal, and Its Ruining Our Conversation (2009)
Nothing necessarily follows from anything else. Sequence becomes merely additive instead of causative the
images bereft of memory, speaking to their own reflections in a vocabulary better suited to the sale of a product
than to the articulation of thought.
Lewis Lapham, Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and Stifling of Democracy (2004)
All this endless back-and-forth is relevant only as it illustrates, by example, distraction and diversion in
action, masquerading as part of a public discourse. This is how we interact now, by mouthing off, steering every
conversation back to our agendas, skimming the surface of each subject looking for an opportunity to spew. We
see it on blogs and in e-mails, on television talk shows, in public meetings and community forums; we are a
culture that seems unable to concentrate, to pursue a line of thought or tolerate a conflicting point of view
Where is the engagement, the deeper reading, the sense of what, exactly, is at stake? How do we pause when we
must know everything in an instant? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do
we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the
time and space to reflect?
As our oversaturated culture collapses into an ever-present now, far more common is a feeling of drift,
both mental and emotional, in which time and context become unmoored. The world is always too close at
hand. You can check your e-mail in an instant, and twenty, thirty times a day, we do. What are we looking for?
Something, everything, a way of staying on top of the information it doesnt matter. The looking is an end
unto itself. It all seems so important in the moment, and yet none of it sticks. That the conversation rarely
changes is not a problem, either; it is entirely the point. We dont want to be challenged but to be soothed.
David L. Ulin, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time (2010)
Its not what you think, its how you think that matters.
Christopher Hitchens, C-SPAN2 Media Panel Discussion, 1997
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and
still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1936)

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day.
Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes
for an average person on an average day. [100,000 words is equivalent to a 300-page novel.]
Global Industry Center at University of California, San Diego, study in December 2009
Never before in human history have our brains had to process as much information as they do today. We have a
generation of people who are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to
think and feel. And much of what they are exposed to is superficial. People are sacrificing depth and feeling and
becoming cut off and disconnected from other people.
Dr. Edward Hallowell, psychitrist and ADD researcher, quoted in GIC study, 2009
My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind without selective
interest, experience is utter chaos.
William James, Pschology (1905)
We are relegating more and more of our mental operations to various technologies, with digital devices
increasingly acting as prostheses for our faculties. We entrust our sense of spatial orientation to satellite
navigation systems; we give mathematical calculations over to the appropriate gadgets. Indeed, the temptation is
to let the computer do much of the thinking for us. We can cut and paste fragments from the Internet and hope
that the collage adds up to something coherent, or interestingly disjunctive. Certainly, we have less need to
remember information ourselves when so much can be stored in our computers memory. The feats of memory
recorded in oral cultures, or performed by Soviet poets and writers under censorship, seem hardly credible
within our zeitgeist. Nadezhda Mandelstam memorized all of her husbands poetry because it was too hazardous
to write it down. Solzhenitsyn committed to memory each page he wrote when he was imprisoned in the Gulag,
and then destroyed the evidence. Such powers of retention are unimaginable to us and they may become even
more so, as we transfer memory to the many storage places available to us there to be filed away, for instant
and effortless retrieval.
By transposing aspects of thought and memory to technology we are externalizing our mental
operations. But both the mind and the psyche require internality.
Eva Hoffman, Time, 2010

Prince Ea, Can We Autocorrect Humanity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRl8EIhrQjQ