140 characters or less
My son and I were speaking this morning and he was bemoaning the fact that the young people in his life seemed to have made up their minds about many important things without benefit of any kind of investigation or consideration for the truth.
He said that as much as he loved them, they seemed to think of him as a fool, and themselves as both more enlightened, well-informed and intelligent.
I happen to know that he is of superior intellect, with a thirst for knowledge and learning, and the drive and ability to sift through information so as to glean real facts and truth. Like me, he’s detail oriented; he likes to drill down and discover why and how something is the way it is. His young people are speaking from ignorance, but so goes the old axiom that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know and “intelligent people are full of doubt, while stupid people are full of confidence.”
His words weighed on me, because just yesterday I was complaining that many of my friends can’t or won’t read my blogs. They say they’re just too busy, and reading a post that takes a couple of minutes simply takes too much time for them. Some have told me that they have to take one of my blogs and read it over a period of two days in order to get through it. Is this really a thing?
When I told him about this, and that apparently people today don’t like reading and perhaps I should switch to a video format, he told me not to bother. He said “It won’t work. The same people who won’t read, also won’t watch a video that goes on for more than a minute. or so”. They live and work in a TikTok world, where videos have a maximum length of 60 seconds. He explained to me that they have a “curiosity or perhaps interest span” that is measured in mere seconds. Not only that, but many people today do not own or use a computer? Their smart phone is their only window to the world, and they don’t want to read a long article on a small screen. He said “they won’t read, and they can’t write”.
He runs a number of very large and successful motor vehicle dealerships and told me he is astounded by how many of his associates and employees simply cannot fill in an application or write legibly in a report.
And then it came to me. I grew up in a system of education that stressed cursive handwriting, spelling, grammar, and creative writing. We never thought about it, but all of these are essentially long forms of communication.
We used to read newspapers and watch the news on television to get information that we could use to form a well-reasoned opinion. The people of America today do not read newspapers; they watch and/or subscribe to influencers and professional opinioneers, without regard for truth or real information. Without realizing it, they have allowed themselves to be manipulated.
I can’t even get many of my younger friends to speak on the phone with me. They want texts only, or to communicate via Facebook or other Social Media. (That’s a problem, because I don’t do Social Media). Weeks ago, I hired a website builder for this blog and he told me he hadn’t spoken to his mother in person or on the phone for three years! He said he only communicates to her via Facebook. As I would give everything I own to have my mother back for one day to explain how much I love and miss her, I found this incredibly bizarre and especially sad.
We now live in a world where news and communication is dispensed in rapid fire hit-and-run bursts, with as few characters and as little time as possible. I just read an article that the most common length of a tweet on Twitter is 33 characters, and only 1% of tweets ever hit 140 characters.
I didn’t want to go down this road as too many of my blogs attack Trump, but I realized I couldn’t write about this topic without mentioning the success and possible genius, of Donald Trump. He abandoned long standing political and constitutional traditions by foregoing press conferences, televised fireside chats with the American people, and simple and open communication with the world in general, and instead used Twitter. Every electronic burst from Trump was designed to take advantage of this new information-at-the-speed-of-light society in which we now live.
By using Twitter and dispensing his opinions and “facts” in quick short bursts, Trump read and knew his target audience. Social media and their complex algorithms monitored the clicks and views of this audience and followed up with more of the same, ensuring that these people would be led exactly where he wanted them to go, and exactly how he wanted them to think.
Whether Mr. Trump is an evil, sociopathic genius or a fool who stumbled upon the right tool at the right time, he succeeded in influencing people as never before.
And what is even more surprising and disappointing to me is that this new normal is not just the young people; even some of my middle-aged friends have seemingly given up on seeking the facts and truth and just worshipping at the altar of professional influencers.
As Americans, we look down upon and despise the radicalized Muslims around the world who blindly follow their hate-filled leaders instead of awakening to the truth, all the while we have fallen into the same exact trap. Different ideologies yes, but the same propaganda technique of giving people an opinion and counting on the fdct they won’t look for the truth. It’s quick fast and dirty, but highly effective.
This is not the end; it is the continuation of the dumbing down of American society and indeed, the world. When people think and believe that they are too busy to work to find the truth, they allow themselves to be controlled, like so many sheep.
And most people won’t read this, because it exceeds both Twitter’s character and TikTok’s time limits, so I’m just p***ing into the wind. At my age, you’d think I’d know better.
Maybe the young people are right. Maybe we shouldn’t care about information or the truth; it’s much easier to let someone else tell us how we feel, so we can spend more time playing with our phones.