Mind Games

At CJR Todd Gitlin takes a look at What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism by Jack Fuller. An excerpt:

So he starts by identifying “four separate forces that came together at the close of the twentieth century to reshape the way people take in news.” There is, first of all, popular suspicion of experts who claim to be objective. There is, second, the even deeper suspicion of whether it is possible to know anything about the world. There is, third, the emergence of information technology that “presented the human mind with unprecedented cognitive and attention challenges.”

But the force that most deeply engages the author—the one that absorbs the plurality of his pages—predates modernist skepticism, postmodernist cynicism, and Craigslist by hundreds of thousands of years. It traces back, he insists, to “Homo sapiens’ prehistoric origins on the African savannah.” What Fuller is talking about is the fact that human beings are simultaneously emotional as well as rational creatures. Thanks to natural selection, our brains are hard-wired to pay attention to novelty . . . Moreover, the more information flies at our brains, the more we are aroused by emotions, including emotions triggered by the sheer energy it takes to navigate through a torrent of information. The more aroused we are by emotions, the more emotions it takes to drive our attention. Meanwhile, the brain gets skewed by all these efforts and the emotions they generate.

Consider the previous paragraph a set of factual dots that Fuller is trying to connect to a second set of dots, as follows: Distracted Americans are turning away from dead-tree newspapers in droves. They are now in possession of electronic devices that are better at gaining attention than newspapers.