Fast, Faster, Fastest: Why the Rush?

Socrates and Plato were not in a hurry. Neither was Aristotle nor Heraclitus. They took time to think deeply. As far back as twenty-four centuries ago, they offered insights and observations about the human condition, character, and personality that are as true today as they were then.

Fast forward to our fast-paced society. Many people think if they talk faster, people will think they’re smarter. Talking fast is not talking smart. Evening TV news interviews of individuals may average five or less seconds, called sound bites, while they averaged about eighteen seconds in the nineteen-seventies. Standardized tests put a premium on how fast you can answer the questions, putting an emphasis on speed and memory rather than understanding. With standardized testing, deeper learning never really had a chance. Marketers aim for your instant gratification when selling you junk food and other impulse buys. “One-click ordering” has taken this system to a completely new level. Smart traders surrender to computerized trading, speculating in split seconds on the stock exchanges. I could give you ten reasons why this is a bad idea.

You can now hear the evening news on National Public Radio in just three or so minutes—an absurdity. There are radio segments called the “academic minute” and the “corporate crime minute,” dedicated to shrinking attention spans.

To state the obvious, there are fast food outlets everywhere—so many that a modest slow food movement is underway. Many hospitals have been known to admit women in labor and discharge these new mothers less than twenty-four hours after they have given birth – exhibiting a corporate form of “attention deficit disorder.” Advertisements for drugs and other consumables end with warnings of adverse effects that are described so swiftly that they are simply incomprehensible. A top sushi restaurant in Tokyo charges by the minute, not the amount ordered—running you about $300 for a thirty minute meal.

 SIDEBAR 

THE FRAGMENTED MIND: Read how the syntax of capitalist television—in addition to its content brimming with lies and omissions— insures a superficial understanding of the real world.  Click on the bar below.

[learn_more] Herbert I. Schiller: Fragmentation As a Form of Communication

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MYTHS ARE USED TO DOMINATE PEOPLE.

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When they are inserted unobtrusively into popular consciousness, as they are by the cultural-informational apparatus, their strength is great because most individuals remain unaware that they have been manipulated. The process of control is made still more effective by the special format in which the myth is transmitted. The technique of transmission can in itself add an extra dimension to the manipulative process. What we find, in fact, is that the form of the communication, as developed in market economies, and in the United States in particular, is an actual embodiment of consciousness control. This is most readily observed in the technique of information dissemination, used pervasively in America, which we shall term fragmentation. Employing a different terminology, Freire notes, “One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action which is almost never perceived by the dedicated but naive professionals who are involved is the emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality.”

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Fragmentation, or focalization, is the dominant–indeed, the exclusive–format for information and news distribution in North America. Radio and television news is characterized by the machine-gun-like recitation of numerous unrelated items. Newspapers are multipaged assemblages of materials set down almost randomly, or in keeping with arcane rules of journalism. Magazines deliberately break up articles, running the bulk of the text in the back of the issue, so that readers must turn several pages of advertising copy to continue reading. Radio and television programs are incessantly interrupted to provide commercial breaks. The commercial has become so deeply internalized in American viewing/listening life that children’s programs, which, it is claimed, are specially designed for educational objectives, utilize the rapid-paced, interrupted pattern of commercial TV though there is no solid evidence that children have short attention spans and need continuous breaks. In fact, it may be that the gradual expansion of the attention span is a controlling factor in the development of children’s intelligence. All the same, Sesame Street, the widely acclaimed program for youngsters, is in its delivery style indistinguishable from the mind-jarring adult commercial review upon which it must base its format or lose its audience of children already conditioned by commercial programs.

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Fragmentation in information delivery is intensified by the needs of the consumer ecorromy to fill all communications space with commercial messages. Exhortations to buy assail everyone from every possible direction. Subways, highways, the airwaves, the mail, and the sky itself (skywriting), are vehicles for advertising’s unrelenting offensives. The total indifference with which advertising treats any political or social event, insisting on intruding no matter what else is being presented, reduces all social phenomena to bizarre and meaningless happenings. Advertising, therefore, in addition to its already recognized functions of selling goods, fostering new consumer wants, and glamorizing the system, provides still another invaluable service to the corporate economy. Its intrusion into every informational and recreational channel reduces the already minimal capability of audiences to gain a sense of the totality of the event, issue, or subject being presented.

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The intrusions also trivialize highly dramatic moments, hindering emotional involvement in any given issue, and thereby indirectly dampening the potential for political protest. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that without advertising, or with a reduction in advertising, events would receive the holistic treatment that is required for understanding the complexities of modern social existence. Advertising, in seeking benefits for its sponsors, is serendipitous to the system in that its utilization heightens fragmentation. Yet it is utterly naive to imagine that the informational machinery, the system’s most vital lever of domination, would deliberately reveal how domination operates.

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Consider, for example, the make-up of any ordinary TV or radio news program, or the first page of any major daily newspaper. The feature common to each is the complete heterogeneity of the material and the absolute denial of the relatedness of the social phenomena reported. Talk shows, which proliferate in the broadcasting media, are perfect models of fragmentation as a format. The occasional insertion of a controversial subject or individual in a multi-item program totally defuses, as well as trivializes, controversy. (Imagine the mix of a nightclub entertainer pushing his next appearance in Las Vegas right after a serious guest who has tried to engage the audience in thinking about the risks of nuclear war.) Thus whatever is said is swallowed up, in subsequent commercials, gags, bosoms, trivia,and gossip. Yet the matter doesn’t end there. Programs of this nature are extolled as evidence of the system’s freewheeling tolerance. The media and their controllers boast of the openness of the communications system that permits such critical material to be aired to the nation. Mass audiences accept this argument and are persuaded that they have access to a free flow of opinion.

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One of the methods of science that is validly transferable to human affairs is the imperative of recognizing interrelatedness. When the totality of a social issue is deliberately avoided, and random bits pertaining to it are offered as “information,” the results are guaranteed: at best, incomprehension; ignorance, apathy, and indifference for the most part.

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The mass media are by no means alone in accentuating fragmentation. The entire cultural-educational sphere encourages and promotes atomization, specialization, and microscopic compartmentalization (super-specialization is an essential requisite for advancement in many areas of business or the professions). A university catalog listing departmental offerings in the social sciences reveals the arbitrary separations enforced in the university learning process. Each discipline insists on its own purity, and the models most admired in each field are those that exclude the untidy effects of interaction with other disciplines. Economics is for economists; politics is for political scientists. As mentioned before, though the two are inseparable in the world of reality, academically their relationship is disavowed or disregarded.

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SIDEBAR ENDS HERE. NORMAL ARTICLE RESUMES.

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ver count how many images flit by in an ordinary TV news show while it is being narrated? Play it again – does the viewer even have a chance to absorb and mentally react? TV advertisements are, of course, more emotionally charged this way.

Then there is Twitter with its limited 140 character tweets, the ping-pong exchanges of text messaging scores of times throughout the day, and the constant immersion in video games. Back in 1999, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her view of James Gleick’s book “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything,” pauses to ponder: “What we lose, as ‘just about everything’ accelerates, is the chance to reflect, to analyze and, ultimately, to come up with moral judgments.”

Not quite everything in our society, however, is speeding up. Rush hour speeds have slowed to ten or fifteen miles per hour in many cities. Banks, in a computer age, deliberately take days to clear checks, maybe hoping to penalize you with a $35 bounced check fee. Try getting through to a business or another institution on an automated phone line. You may have to work through ten levels of “press one, press two…” After choosing, you may only have the opportunity to leave a voicemail message.

As a society, it has taken far too long to implement proven policies that could address and abolish poverty, including raising the minimum wage that has been long gutted by inflation. As a society, we are too slowly expanding mass transit, confronting climate change, converting to renewable energy, and improving the miles per gallon of our automobiles.

Except for Medicare reimbursements, physicians know how long it takes for insurance companies to pay up. Our companies and governments take a long time to clean up their own pollution or respond to complaints from consumers and citizens. These days, it’s looking like a contest of who can care less.

On the other hand, a bizarre, frantic emphasis has emerged to get the packages you order delivered faster and faster. Amazon is following through on their wildest dreams and even thinking about using drones to make deliveries. Likewise, Walmart is gearing up to deliver to your homes and businesses as fast as they can. Pretty soon, people won’t have to go to stores; they’ll just order everything online and never see any other shoppers or have chance meetings with friends and neighbors. Let’s hear the applause from those people who haven’t thought through these “improvements” and the resulting destruction of communities.

Entertainment is a bubble waiting to burst. People do not have more than two eyes, two ears, or twenty-four hours in a day. In the nineteen-fifties, there were three national television networks. Now, there are hundreds of cable channels and over-the-air TV stations, not to mention the avalanche of internet-based programs and diversions. The pressure for ratings is starting to implode on its vendors. In an article published on August 31, 2015 in the New York Times titled “Soul Searching in TV Land,” reporter John Koblin, sums up the “malaise in TV these days,” namely, “there is simply too much on television.” Too much is colliding with too fast and our technological wonderland is fraying.

Hewlett Packard (HP) has just started an advertising campaign with the headline: “The Future Belongs to the Fast.” The text includes this message: “HP believes that when people, technology, and ideas all come together, business can move further, faster.”

By contrast, fifteen years ago, Bill Joy, the famous technology inventor/innovator wrote an article titled “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” citing the oncoming converging technologies of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

So which is it? Got a minute to think about it? Hurry! Oops, you’ve just lost 63 nanoseconds already trying to decide.

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