Marty Kaplan describes the symptoms [1] and gives a name to “the very real nausea that culture (to use a kind word for it) can cause”: Attention Sickness.
First the BIG THING was ANNA NICOLE. Then it was WAR FUNDING. Then it was SANJAYA, and vote-for-the-worst sadism. Then it was CANCER, and our national debate about parental responsibility. Then it was GONZALES, and US ATTORNEY FIRINGS, and MISSING EMAILS. Then it was IMUS, and our national debate about race. Now it’s VIRGINIA TECH . . .
Confronted by these attempts to get our attention, we are pigeons, B.F. Skinner’s pigeons, our nervous and limbic systems automatically responding to the stimuli. Short of retreating to Walden, it’s virtually impossible to escape the onslaught. . . . I can’t believe that the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – doesn’t already list a category like “attention sickness,” a box on insurance forms that shrinks can check off.
This red-alert hype of continuous intentional distraction – OMG! LOOK AT THIS! NO, THIS! NO, THIS! – makes everything seem the same. It’s next to impossible to think proportionately, to give commensurate, differential, appropriate attention to the various info-storms assaulting us. [I]n the great Skinner box of modern media culture, our higher minds are no match for the sparklies that stimulate us, and which — not incidentally — raise the profits of business and serve the agendas of politics . . .
I just don’t know whether there’s room in my noggin, or in our collective consciousness, for all this stuff, this indiscriminate mix of crap and content. But I do know that it’s really hard to build a progressive political movement, and to keep our eyes on what’s truly important, in an attention economy in the midst of hyperinflation — in a bread-and-circuses culture that is (in Neil Postman’s prophetic phrase) amusing itself to death.
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