Social Media Is Keeping Us Stuck In The Moment

I tweeted about this the other day but I think it bears repeating here. This article from Clive Thompson entitled Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment is not just a diatribe about the moment-to-moment distractions of our Internet landscape but a historical lesson about the power of a messages medium. The piece talks about the dangers of Reverse Chronology and how everything in our feeds is presented to us in a bite size morsel that happened a few moments ago, contextless until we scroll further or click back in time to some referential tweet. Furthermore, each platform is designed to have you refresh to see the latest, with very little emphasis on what you may have missed.

I can't do the article justice in summary form. Thompson's presentation involves insights from Marshall McLuhan, the durability and reach of clay tablets vs papyrus and then radio and TV from there. It sounds like heady stuff but it's an easy read that gives historical context to what we're seeing now. I can't emphasize that phrase enough given how our Internet and 24/7 news seems to have completely dropped the importance of history. Here's my favorite bit:

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.“

I don't know how we fix this problem but I love that Thompson was able to articulate what he sees as the issue and even offer some suggestions; both in terms of our own behaviors (which seem alarmingly difficult to control) and via new features on the platforms. Looking ahead, AI and technology is going to shape our entire planet in a huge way and we're going to need to make sure it's got some insight on the past when it does so.

Image by Todd McLellan. Link via Austin Kleon.