POLITICSover serious thought when we debate the important ques-
tions the nation must address. Thirty years on, the question
remains. Of the infinite forms communication technology
might have taken, why, like TV news, has internet news ele-
vated brevity and novelty over in-depth analysis? Aren’t the
events of the world worth more attention?
The answer is desire dopamine. A short, slick story stands
out from the landscape—it is salient. It delivers a quick hit of
dopamine and grabs our attention. Thus we click through a
dozen provocative headlines that lead to kitten videos and
skip the long essay about healthcare. The healthcare story is
more pertinent to our lives, but the work of processing that
story is no match for the easy pleasure of those dopamine
hits. Control dopamine could push back, but it is invariably
overpowered by the flood of whatever is new and shiny, and
such things are the currency of the Internet.
Where will this lead? Probably not to a renaissance of
long-form journalism. As quick-hit stories grow more prev-
alent in the news environment, they must get shorter and
shallower to compete. Where does such a cycle end? Even
words may not be bedrock. Most cellphones now offer to
replace the text of typed phrases with something faster and
simpler (and cruder) to catch the eye: an emoji.
Postman may not have known the neuroscientific cause
of all this, but he understood its effect: “And so, we move
rapidly into an information environment which may rightly
be called trivial pursuit. As the game of that name uses facts
as a source of amusement, so do our sources of news. It has
been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive
misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demon-
strated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure
of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its
news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.”