Too true. I starting commenting (lamenting is a better word) about the collapse in critical thinking in the US back in the late 90s.
It has gotten worse, and it correlates with a willingness of a population (large swaths anyway) to be easily put into boxes by simple minded means (i.e. simple minded propaganda on TV). For two of my in-laws, they just need one 'fact' to decide who to vote for: are you against abortion? Doesn't matter what else happens. The parties know that there are these easy to capture votes, so the more divisive they can be, the more of these 'slam dunk' votes they can claim.
And we are a nation of scientific illiterates with a delusion that google search /cut/paste is science, or even fact. Most had few if any courses in high school, and even those could have been very poor like most at my kids' high school, and for the vast majority, nothing more than a skim course in college.
Part of what's happened is that there is a barrage of information bombarding many. Who has time or desire to read a whole article (like that New Yorker article I just posted) when they have fifty other headline alerts on their phones? Does anybody else do like me and turn off nearly every alert from every app?
It takes time, energy, and thinking to absorb an article like that and more time to put it into context of other thoughtful pieces. Attention spans have been shrinking for decades, and few bother nowadays to really get to understand something. Even fewer can pull together thoughts from many different arenas to make sense of bigger trends. It's just easy to scroll through FB likes than to think about uncomfortable stuff, and our system in the US strongly encourages that behavior.
I don't watch Fox News. And I don't watch CNN because it suffers from a similar problem -- narrow focus and too much emphasis on swaying opinions. I don't watch national news because it is just skimming a few items. I rarely watch local news because it focuses on so many negative things (which actually are happening, but the good things aren't 'news' but they are still happening). Except sports... -g- |
