Category Archives: Cognition

Social Media Reflects Rights Vs. Obligations Split

Last week MediaPost writer (and my own editor here on Media Insider) Phyllis Fine asked this question in a post: “Can Social Media Ease the Path to Herd Immunity?” The question is not only timely, but also indicative of the peculiar nature of social media that could be stated thus: for every point of view expressed, there is an equal — and opposite — point of view. Fine’s post quotes a study from the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich, which reveals, “Anti-vaccination supporters find fertile ground in particular on Facebook and Twitter.”

Here’s the thing about social media. No matter what the message might be, there will be multiple interpretations of it. Often, the most extreme interpretations will be diametrically opposed to each other. It’s stunning how the very same content can illustrate the vast ideological divides that separate us.

I’ve realized that the only explanation for this is that our brains must work differently. We’re not even talking apples and oranges here. This is more like ostrich eggs and vacuum cleaners.

This is not my own revelation. There’s a lot of science behind it. An article in Scientific American catalogs some of the difference between conservative and liberal brains. Even the actual structure is different. According to the article: “The volume of gray matter, or neural cell bodies, making up the anterior cingulate cortex, an area that helps detect errors and resolve conflicts, tends to be larger in liberals. And the amygdala, which is important for regulating emotions and evaluating threats, is larger in conservatives.”

We have to understand that a right-leaning brain operates very differently than a left-leaning brain. Recent neuro-imaging studies have shown that they can consider the very same piece of information and totally different sections of their respective brains light up. They process information differently.

In a previous post about this topic, I quoted biologist and author Robert Sapolsky as saying, “Liberals are more likely to process information systematically, recognize differences in argument quality, and to be persuaded explicitly by scientific evidence, whereas conservatives are more likely to process information heuristically, attend to message-irrelevant cues such as source similarity, and to be persuaded implicitly through evaluative conditioning. Conservatives are also more likely than liberals to rely on stereotypical cues and assume consensus with like-minded others.”

Or, to sum it up in plain language: “Conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head.”

This has never been clearer than in the past year. Typically, the information being processed by a conservative brain would have little overlap with the information being processed by a liberal brain. Each would care and think about different things.

But COVID-19 has forced the two circles of this particular Venn diagram together, creating a bigger overlap in the middle. We are all focused on information about the pandemic. And this has created a unique opportunity to more directly compare the cognitive habits of liberals versus conservatives.

Perhaps the biggest difference is in the way each group defines morality. At the risk of a vast oversimplification, the right tends to focus on individual rights, especially those they feel they’re personally are at risk of losing. The left thinks more in terms of societal obligations: What do we need to do — or not do — for the greater good of us all?  To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, conservatives ask what their country can do for them; liberals ask what they can do for their country.

This theory is part of Jonathon Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. What Haidt, working with others, has found is that both the right and left have morals, but they are defined differently. This “moral pluralism” means that two people can look at the same social media post but take two entirely different messages from it. And both will insist their interpretation is the correct one. Liberals can see a post about getting a vaccine as an appeal to their concern for the collective well being of their community. Conservatives see it as an attack on their personal rights.

So when we ask a question like “Can social media ease the path to herd immunity?” we run into the problem of message interpretation. For some, it will be preaching to the choir. For others, it will have the same effect as a red cape in front of a bull.

It’s interesting that the vaccine question is being road-blocked by this divide between rights and obligations. It shows just how far the two sides are apart. With a vaccine, at least both sides have skin in the game. Getting a vaccine can save your life, no matter how you vote. Wearing a face mask is a different matter.

In my lifetime, I have never seen a more overt signalling of ideological leanings than whether you choose to wear a face mask or not. When we talk about rights vs obligations, this is the ultimate acid test. If I insist on wearing a mask, as I do, I’m not wearing it for me, I’m wearing it for you. It’s part of my obligation to my community. But if you refuse to wear a mask, it’s pretty obvious who you’re focused on.

The thing that worries me the most about this moral dualism is that a moral fixation on individual rights is not sustainable. It’s assuming that our society is a zero-sum game. In order for me to win, you must lose. If we focus instead on our obligations, we approach society with an abundance mentality. As we contribute, we all benefit.

At least, that’s how my brain sees it.

Picking Apart the Concept of Viral Videos

In case you’re wondering, the most popular video on YouTube is the toxic brain worm Baby Shark Dance. It has over 8.2 billion views.

And from that one example, we tend to measure everything that comes after.  Digital has screwed up our idea of what it means to go viral. We’re not happy unless we get into the hyper-inflated numbers typical of social media influencers. Maybe not Baby Shark numbers, but definitely in the millions.

But does that mean that something that doesn’t hit these numbers is a failure? An old stat I found said that over half of YouTube videos have less than 500 views. I couldn’t find a more recent tally, but I suspect that’s still true.

And, if it is, my immediate thought is that those videos must suck. They weren’t worth sharing. They didn’t have what it takes to go viral. They are forever stuck in the long, long tail of YouTube wannabes.

But is going viral all it’s cracked up to be?

Let’s do a little back-of-an-envelope comparison. A week and a half ago, I launched a video that has since gotten about 1,500 views. A few days ago, a YouTuber named MrBeast launched a video titled, “I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive.” In less than 24 hours, it racked up over 30 million views. Compared to that, one might say my launch was a failure. But was it?  It depends on what your goals for a video are. And it also depends on the structure of social networks.

Social networks are built of nodes. Within the node, people are connected by strong ties. They have a lot in common. But nodes are often connected by weak ties. These bonds stretch across groups that have less in common. Understanding this structure is important in understanding how a video might spread through a network.

Depending on your video’s content, it may never move beyond one node. It may not have the characteristics necessary to get passed along the ties that connect separate nodes. This was something I explored many years ago when I looked at how rumors spread through social networks. In that post, I talked about a study by Frenzen and Nakamoto that looked at some of the variables required to make a rumor spread between nodes.

Some of the same dynamics hold true when we look at viral videos. If you’ve had less than 500 views, as apparently over 50% of YouTube videos do, chances are you got stuck in a node. But this might not be a bad thing. Sometimes going deep is better than going wide.

My video, for example, is definitely aimed at one particular audience, people of Italian descent in the region where I live. According to the latest government census, the total possible “target” for my video is probably less than 10,000 people. And, if this is the case, I’ve already reached 15% of my audience. That’s not a mind-blowing success record, but it’s a start.

My goal for the video was to ignite an interest in my audience to learn more about their own heritage. And it seems to be working. I’ve never seen more interest in people wanting to learn about their own ancestors in particular, or the story of Italians in the Okanagan region of British Columbia in general.

My goal was never to just get a like or even a share, although that would be nice. My goal was to move people enough to act. I wanted to go deep, not wide.

To go “deep,” you have to fully leverage those “strong ties.” What is the stuff those ties are made of? What is the common ground within the node? The things that make people watch all 13-and-a-half minutes of a video about Italian immigrants are the very same things that will keep it stuck within that particular node. As long as it stays there, it will be interesting and relevant. But it won’t jump across a weak tie, because there is no common ground to act as a launching pad.

If the goal is to go “wide” and set a network effect in motion, then you have to play to the lowest common denominator: those universal emotions that we all share, which can be ignited just long enough to capture a quick view and a social share. According to this post about how to go viral, they are: status, identity protection, being helpful, safety, order, novelty, validation and voyeurism.

Another way to think of it is this: Do you want your content to trigger “fast” thinking or “slow” thinking? Again, I use Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s cognitive analogy about how the brain works at two levels: fast and slow. If you want your content to “go wide,” you want to trigger the “fast” circuits of the brain. If you want your content to “go deep,” you’re looking to activate the “slow” circuits. It doesn’t mean that “deep” content can’t be emotionally charged. The opposite is often true. But these are emotions that require some cognitive focus and mindfulness, not a hair-trigger reaction. And, if you’re successful, that makes them all the more powerful. These are emotions that serve their inherent purpose. They move us to action.

I think this whole idea of going “viral” suffers from the same hyper-inflation of expectations that seems to affect everything that goes digital. We are naturally comparative and competitive animals, and the world that’s gone viral tends to focus us on quantity rather than quality. We can’t help looking at trending YouTube videos and hoping that our video will get launched into the social sharing stratosphere.

But that doesn’t mean a video that stays stuck with a few hundred views didn’t do its job. Maybe the reason the numbers are low is that the video is doing exactly what it was intended to do.

COVID And The Chasm Crossing

For most of us, it’s been a year living with the pandemic. I was curious what my topic was a year ago this week. It was talking about the brand crisis at a certain Mexican brewing giant when its flagship brand was suddenly and unceremoniously linked with a global pandemic. Of course, we didn’t know then just how “global” it would be back then.

Ahhh — the innocence of early 2020.

The past year will likely be an historic inflection point in many societal trend lines. We’re not sure at this point how things will change, but we’re pretty sure they will change. You can’t take what has essentially been a 12-month anomaly in everything we know as normal, plunk it down on every corner of the globe and expect everything just to bounce back to where it was.

If I could vault 10 years in the future and then look back at today, I suspect I would be talking about how our relationship with technology changed due to the pandemic. Yes, we’re all sick of Zoom. We long for the old days of actually seeing another face in the staff lunchroom. And we realize that bingeing “Emily in Paris” on Netflix comes up abysmally short of the actual experience of stepping in dog shit as we stroll along the Seine.

C’est la vie.

But that’s my point. For the past 12 months, these watered-down digital substitutes have been our lives. We were given no choice. And some of it hasn’t sucked. As I wrote last week, there are times when a digital connection may actually be preferable to a physical one.

There is now a whole generation of employees who are considering their work-life balance in the light of being able to work from home for at least part of the time. Meetings the world over are being reimagined, thanks to the attractive cost/benefit ratio of being able to attend virtually. And, for me, I may have permanently swapped riding my bike trainer in my basement for spin classes in the gym. It took me a while to get used to it, but now that I have, I think it will stick.

Getting people to try something new — especially when it’s technology — is a tricky process. There are a zillion places on the uphill slope of the adoption curve where we can get mired and give up. But, as I said, that hasn’t been an option for us in the past 12 months. We had to stick it out. And now that we have, we realize we like much of what we were forced to adopt. All we’re asking for is the freedom to pick and choose what we keep and what we toss away.

I suspect  many of us will be a lot more open to using technology now that we have experienced the tradeoffs it entails between effectiveness and efficiency. We will make more room in our lives for a purely utilitarian use of technology, stripped of the pros and cons of “bright shiny object” syndrome.

Technology typically gets trapped at both the dread and pseudo-religious devotion ends of the Everett Rogers Adoption Curve. Either you love it, or you hate it. Those who love it form the market that drives the development of our technology, leaving those who hate it further and further behind.

As such, the market for technology tends to skew to the “gee whiz” end of the market, catering to those who buy new technology just because it’s new and cool. This bias has embedded an acceptance of planned obsolescence that just seems to go hand-in-hand with the marketing of technology. 

My previous post about technology leaving seniors behind is an example of this. Even if seniors start out as early adopters, the perpetual chase of the bright shiny object that typifies the tech market can leave them behind.

But COVID-19 changed all that. It suddenly forced all of us toward the hump that lies in the middle of the adoption curve. It has left the world no choice but to cross the “chasm” that  Geoffrey Moore wrote about 30 years ago in his book “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers.” He explained that the chasm was between “visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority),” according to Wikipedia.

This has some interesting market implications. After I wrote my post, a few readers reached out saying they were working on solutions that addressed the need of seniors to stay connected with a device that is easier for them to use and is not subject to the need for constant updating and relearning. Granted, neither of them was from Apple nor Google, but at least someone was thinking about it.

As the pandemic forced the practical market for technology to expand, bringing customers who had everyday needs for their technology, it created more market opportunities. Those opportunities create pockets of profit that allow for the development of tools for segments of the market that used to be ignored.

It remains to be seen if this market expansion continues after the world returns to a more physically based definition of normal. I suspect it will.

This market evolution may also open up new business model opportunities — where we’re actually willing to pay for online services and platforms that used to be propped up by selling advertising. This move alone would take technology a massive step forward in ethical terms. We wouldn’t have this weird moral dichotomy where marketers are grieving the loss of data (as fellow Media Insider Ted McConnell does in this post) because tech is finally stepping up and protecting our personal privacy.

Perhaps — I hope — the silver lining in the past year is that we will look at technology more as it should be: a tool that’s used to make our lives more fulfilling.

To Be There – Or Not To Be There

According to Eventbrite, hybrid events are the hottest thing for 2021. So I started thinking, what would that possibly look like, as a planner or a participant?

The interesting thing about hybrid events is that they force us to really think about how we experience things. What process do we go through when we let the outside world in? What do we lose if we do that virtually? What do we gain, if anything? And, more importantly, how do we connect with other people during those experiences?

These are questions we didn’t think much about even a year ago. But today, in a reality that’s trying to straddle both the physical and virtual worlds, they are highly relevant to how we’ll live our lives in the future.

The Italian Cooking Lesson

First, let’s try a little thought experiment.

In our town, the local Italian Club — in which both my wife and I are involved — offered cooking lessons before we were all locked down. Groups of eight to 12 people would get together with an exuberant Italian chef in a large commercial kitchen, and together they would make an authentic dish like gnocchi or ravioli. There was a little vino, a little Italian culture and a lot of laughter. These classes were a tremendous hit.

That all ended last March. But we hope to we start thinking about offering them again late in 2021 or 2022. And, if we do, would it make sense to offer them as a “hybrid” event, where you can participate in person or pick up a box of preselected ingredients and follow along in your own kitchen?

As an event organizer, this would be tempting. You can still charge the full price for physical attendance where you’re restricted to 12 people, but you could create an additional revenue stream by introducing a virtual option that could involve as many people as possible. Even at a lower registration fee, it would still dramatically increase revenue at a relatively small incremental cost. It would be “molto” profitable.

But now consider this as an attendee.Would you sign up for a virtual event like that? If you had no other option to experience it, maybe. But what if you could actually be there in person? Then what? Would you feel relegated to a second-class experience by being isolated in your own kitchen, without many of the sensory benefits that go along with the physical experience?

The Psychology of Zoom Fatigue

When I thought about our cooking lesson example, I was feeling less than enthused. And I wondered why.

It turns out that there’s some actual brain science behind my digital ennui. In an article in the Psychiatric Times, Jena Lee, MD, takes us on a “Neuropsychological Exploration of Zoom Fatigue.”

A decade ago, I was writing a lot about how we balance risk and reward. I believe that a lot of our behaviors can be explained by how we calculate the dynamic tension between those two things. It turns out that it may also be at the root of how we feel about virtual events. Dr. Lee explains,

“A core psychological component of fatigue is a rewards-costs trade-off that happens in our minds unconsciously. Basically, at every level of behavior, a trade-off is made between the likely rewards versus costs of engaging in a certain activity.”

Let’s take our Italian cooking class again. Let’s imagine we’re there in person. For our brain, this would hit all the right “reward” buttons that come with being physically “in the moment.” Subconsciously, our brains would reward us by releasing oxytocin and dopamine along with other “pleasure” neurochemicals that would make the experience highly enjoyable for us. The cost/reward calculation would be heavily weighted toward “reward.”

But that’s not the case with the virtual event. Yes, it might still be considered “rewarding,” but at an entirely different — and lesser — scale of the same “in-person” experience. In addition, we would have the additional costs of figuring out the technology required, logging into the lesson and trying to follow along. Our risk/reward calculator just might decide the tradeoffs required weren’t worth it.

Without me even knowing it, this was the calculation that was going on in my head that left me less than enthused.

 But there is a flip side to this.

Reducing the Risk Virtually

Last fall, a new study from Oracle in the U.K. was published with the headline, “82% of People Believe Robots Can Support Their Mental Health Better than Humans.”

Something about that just didn’t seem right to me. How could this be? Again, we had the choice between virtual and physical connection, and this time the odds were overwhelmingly in favor of the virtual option.

But when I thought about it in terms of risk and reward, it suddenly made sense. Talking about our own mental health is a high-risk activity. It’s sad to say, but opening up to your manager about job-related stress could get you a sympathetic ear, or it could get you fired. We are taking baby steps towards destigmatizing mental health issues, but we’re at the beginning of a very long journey.

In this case, the risk/reward calculation is flipped completely around. Virtual connections, which rely on limited bandwidth — and therefore limited vulnerability on our part — seem like a much lower risk alternative than pouring our hearts out in person. This is especially true if we can remain anonymous.

It’s All About Human Hardware

The idea of virtual/physical hybrids with expanded revenue streams will be very attractive to marketers and event organizers. There will be many jumping on this bandwagon. But, like all the new opportunities that technology brings us, it has to interface with a system that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years — otherwise known as our brain.

The Crazy World of Our Media Obsessions

Are you watching the news less? Me too. Now that the grownups are back in charge, I’m spending much less time checking my news feed.

Whatever you might say about the last four years, it certainly was good for the news business. It was one long endless loop of driving past a horrific traffic accident. Try as we might, we just couldn’t avoid looking.

But according to Internet analysis tool Alexa.com, that may be over. I ran some traffic rank reports for major news portals and they all look the same: a ramp-up over the past 90 days to the beginning of February, and then a precipitous drop off a cliff.

While all the top portals have a similar pattern, it’s most obvious on Foxnews.com.

It was as if someone said, “Show’s over folks. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.” And after we all exhaled, we did!

Not surprisingly, we watch the news more when something terrible is happening. It’s an evolved hardwired response called negativity bias.

Good news is nice. But bad news can kill you. So it’s not surprising that bad news tends to catch our attention.

But this was more than that. We were fixated by Trump. If it were just our bias toward bad news, we would still eventually get tired of it.

That’s exactly what happened with the news on COVID-19. We worked through the initial uncertainty and fear, where we were looking for more information, and at some point moved on to the subsequent psychological stages of boredom and anger. As we did that, we threw up our hands and said, “Enough already!”

But when it comes to Donald Trump, there was something else happening.

It’s been said that Trump might have been the best instinctive communicator to ever take up residence in the White House. We might not agree with what he said, but we certainly were listening.

And while we — and by we, I mean me — think we would love to put him behind us, I believe it behooves us to take a peek under the hood of this particular obsession. Because if we fell for it once, we could do it again.

How the F*$k did this guy dominate our every waking, news-consuming moment for the past four years?

We may find a clue in Bob Woodward’s book on Trump, Rage. He explains that he was looking for a “reflector” — a person who knew Trump intimately and could provide some relatively objective insight into his character.

Woodward found a rather unlikely candidate for his reflector: Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

I know, I know — “Kushner?” Just bear with me.

In Woodward’s book, Kushner says there were four things you needed to read and “absorb” to understand how Trump’s mind works.

The first was an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan called “Over Trump, We’re as Divided as Ever.” It is not complimentary to Trump. But it does begin to provide a possible answer to our ongoing fixation. Noonan explains: “He’s crazy…and it’s kind of working.”

The second was the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. Kushner paraphrased: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will get you there.” In other words, in Trump’s world, it’s not direction that matters, it’s velocity.

The third was Chris Whipple’s book, The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency. The insight here is that no matter how clueless Trump was about how to do his job, he still felt he knew more than his chiefs of staff.

Finally, the fourth was Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, by Scott Adams. That’s right — Scott Adams, the same guy who created the “Dilbert” comic strip. Adams calls Trump’s approach “Intentional Wrongness Persuasion.”

Remember, this is coming from Kushner, a guy who says he worships Trump. This is not apologetic. It’s explanatory — a manual on how to communicate in today’s world. Kushner is embracing Trump’s instinctive, scorched-earth approach to keeping our attention focused on him.

It’s — as Peggy Noonan realized — leaning into the “crazy.”  

Trump represented the ultimate political tribal badge. All you needed to do was read one story on Trump, and you knew exactly where you belonged. You knew it in your core, in your bones, without any shred of ambiguity or doubt. There were few things I was as sure of in this world as where I stood on Donald J. Trump.

And maybe that was somehow satisfying to me.

There was something about standing one side or the other of the divide created by Trump that was tribal in nature.

It was probably the clearest ideological signal about what was good and what was bad that we’ve seen for some time, perhaps since World War II or the ’60s — two events that happened before most of our lifetimes.

Trump’s genius was that he somehow made both halves of the world believe they were the good guys.

In 2018, Peggy Noonan said that “Crazy won’t go the distance.” I’d like to believe that’s so, but I’m not so sure. There are certainly others that are borrowing a page from Trump’s playbook.  Right-wing Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are both doing “crazy” extraordinarily well. The fact that almost none of you had to Google them to know who they are proves this.

Whether we’re loving to love, or loving to hate, we are all fixated by crazy.

The problem here is that our media ecosystem has changed. “Crazy” used to be filtered out. But somewhere along the line, news outlets discovered that “crazy” is great for their bottom lines.

As former CBS Chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves said when Trump became the Republican Presidential forerunner back in 2016, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damned good for CBS.”

Crazy draws eyeballs like, well, like crazy. It certainly generates more user views then “normal” or “competent.”

In our current media environment  — densely intertwined with the wild world of social media — we have no crazy filters. All we have now are crazy amplifiers.

And the platforms that allow this all try to crowd on the same shaky piece of moral high ground.

According to them, it’s not their job to filter out crazy. It’s anti-free speech. It’s un-American. We should be smart enough to recognize crazy when we see it.

Hmmm. Well, we know that’s not working.

Connected Technologies are Leaving Our Seniors Behind

One of my pandemic projects has been editing a video series of oral history interviews we did with local seniors in my community. Last week, I finished the first video in the series. The original plan, pre-pandemic, was to unveil the video as a special event at a local theater, with the participants attending. Obviously, given our current reality, we had to change our plans.

We, like the rest of the world, moved our event online. As I started working through the logistics of this, I quickly realized something: Our seniors are on the other side of a wide and rapidly growing chasm. Yes, our society is digitally connected in ways we never were before, but those connections are not designed for the elderly. In fact, if you were looking for something that seems to be deliberately designed to disadvantage a segment of our population, it would be hard to find a better example than Internet connection and the elderly.

I have to admit, for much of the past year, I have been pretty focused on what I have sacrificed because of the pandemic. But I am still a pretty connected person. I can Zoom and have a virtual visit with my friends. If I wonder how my daughters are doing, I can instantly text them. If I miss their faces, I can FaceTime them. 

I have taken on the projects I’ve been able to do thanks to the privilege of being wired into the virtual world.   I can even go on a virtual bike ride with my friends through the streets of London, courtesy of Zwift.

Yes, I have given up things, but I have also been able find digital substitutes for many of those things. I’m not going to say it’s been perfect, but it’s certainly been passable.

My stepdad, who is turning 86, has been able to do none of those things. He is in a long-term care home in Alberta, Canada. His only daily social connections consist of brief interactions with staff during mealtime and when they check his blood sugar levels and give him his medication. All the activities that used to give him a chance to socialize are gone. Imagine life for him, where his sum total of connection is probably less than 30 minutes a day. And, on most days, none of that connecting is done with the people he loves.

Up until last week, family couldn’t even visit him. He was locked down due to an outbreak at his home. For my dad, there were no virtual substitutes available. He is not wired in any way for digital connection. If anyone has paid the social price of this pandemic, it’s been my dad and people like the seniors I interviewed, for whom I was desperately trying to find a way for them just to watch a 13-minute video that they had starred in.

A recent study by mobile technology manufacturer Ericsson looked specifically at the relationship between technology and seniors during the pandemic. The study focused on what the company termed the “young-old” seniors, those aged 65-74. They didn’t deal with “middle-old” (aged 75-85) or “oldest-old” (86 plus) because — well, probably because Ericsson couldn’t find enough who were connected to act as a representative sample.

But they did find that even the “young old” were falling behind in their ability to stay connected thanks to COVID-19. These are people who have owned smartphones for at least a decade, many of whom had to use computers and technology in their jobs. Up until a year ago, they were closing the technology gap with younger generations. Then, last March, they started to fall behind.

They were still using the internet, but younger people were using it even more. And, as they got older, they were finding it increasingly daunting to adopt new platforms and technology. They didn’t have the same access to “family tech support” of children or grandchildren to help get them over the learning curve. They were sticking to the things they knew how to do as the rest of the world surged forward and started living their lives in a digital landscape.

But this was not the group that was part of my video project. My experience had been with the “middle old” and “oldest old.” Half fell into the “middle old” group and half fell into the “oldest old” group. Of the eight seniors I was dealing with, only two had emails. If the “young old” are being left behind by technology, these people were never in the race to begin with. As the world was forced to reset to an online reality, these people were never given the option. They were stranded in a world suddenly disconnected from everything they knew and loved.

Predictably, the Ericsson study proposes smartphones as the solution for many of the problems of the pandemic, giving seniors more connection, more confidence and more capabilities. If only they got connected, the study says, life will be better.

But that’s not a solution with legs. It won’t go the distance. And to understand why, we just have to look at the two age cohorts the study didn’t focus on, the “middle old” and the “oldest old.”

Perhaps the hardest hit have been the “oldest old,” who have sacrificed both physical and digital connection, as this Journals of Gerontologyarticle notes.   Four from my group lived in long-term care facilities. Many of these were locked down at some point due to local outbreaks within the facility. Suddenly, that family support they required to connect with their family and friends was no longer available. The technological tools  that we take for granted — which we were able to slot in to take the place of things we were losing — were unimaginable to them. They were literally sentenced to solitary confinement.

A recent study from Germany found that only 3% of those living in long-term care facilities used an internet-connected device. A lot of the time, cognitive declines, even when they’re mild, can make trying to use technology an exercise in frustration.

When my dad went into his long-term care home, my sister and I gave him one of our old phones so he could stay connected. We set everything up and did receive a few experimental texts from him. But soon, it just became too confusing and frustrating for him to use without our constant help. He played solitaire on it for a while, then it ended up in a drawer somewhere. We didn’t push the issue. It just wasn’t the right fit.

But it’s not just my dad who struggled with technology. Even if an aging population starts out as reasonably proficient users, it can be overwhelming to keep up with new hardware, new operating systems and new security requirements. I’m not even “young old” yet, and I’ve worked with technology all my life. I owned a digital marketing company, for heaven’s sake. And even for me, it sometimes seems like a full-time job staying on top of the constant stream of updates and new things to learn and troubleshoot. As connected technology leaps forward, it does not seem unduly concerned that it’s leaving the most vulnerable segment of our population behind.

COVID-19 has pushed us into a virtual world where connection is not just a luxury, but a condition of survival. We need to connect to live. That is especially true for our seniors, who have had all the connections they relied on taken from them. We can’t leave them behind. Connected technology can no longer ignore them.

This is one gap we need to build a bridge over.

Our Disappearing Attention Spans

Last week, Mediapost Editor in Chief Joe Mandese mused about our declining attention spans. He wrote, 

“while in the past, the most common addictive analogy might have been opiates — as in an insatiable desire to want more — these days [consumers] seem more like speed freaks looking for the next fix.”

Mandese cited a couple of recent studies, saying that more than half of mobile users tend to abandon any website that takes longer than three seconds to load. That

“has huge implications for the entire media ecosystem — even TV and video — because consumers increasingly are accessing all forms of content and commerce via their mobile devices.”

The question that begs to be asked here is, “Is a short attention span a bad thing?” The famous comparison is that we are now more easily distracted than a goldfish. But does a shorter attention span negatively impact us, or is it just our brain changing to be a better fit with our environment?

Academics have been debating the impact of technology on our ability to cognitively process things for some time. Journalist Nicholas Carr sounded the warning in his 2010 book, “The Shallows,” where he wrote, 

” (Our brains are) very malleable, they adapt at the cellular level to whatever we happen to be doing. And so the more time we spend surfing, and skimming, and scanning … the more adept we become at that mode of thinking.”

Certainly, Carr is right about the plasticity of our brains. It’s one of the most advantageous features about them. But is our digital environment forever pushing our brains to the shallow end of the pool? Well, it depends. Context is important. One of the biggest factors in determining how we process the information we’re seeing is the device where we’re seeing it.

Back in 2010, Microsoft did a large-scale ethnographic study on how people searched for information on different devices. The researchers found those behaviors differed greatly depending on the platform being used and the intent of the searcher. They found three main categories of search behaviors:

  • Missions are looking for one specific answer (for example, an address or phone number) and often happen on a mobile device.
  • Excavations are widespread searches that need to combine different types of information (for example, researching an upcoming trip or major purchase). They are usually launched on a desktop.
  • Finally, there are Explorations: searching for novelty, often to pass the time. These can happen on all types of devices and can often progress through different devices as the exploration evolves. The initial search may be launched on a mobile device, but as the user gets deeper into the exploration, she may switch to a desktop.

The important thing about this research was that it showed our information-seeking behaviors are very tied to intent, which in turn determines the device used. So, at a surface level, we shouldn’t be too quick to extrapolate behaviors seen on mobile devices with certain intents to other platforms or other intents. We’re very good at matching a search strategy to the strengths and weaknesses of the device we’re using.

But at a deeper level, if Carr is right (and I believe he is) about our constant split-second scanning of information to find items of interest making permanent changes in our brains, what are the implications of this?

For such a fundamentally important question, there is a small but rapidly growing body of academic research that has tried to answer it. To add to the murkiness, many of the studies done contradict each other. The best summary I could find of academia’s quest to determine if “the Internet is making us stupid” was a 2015 article in academic journal The Neuroscientist.

The authors sum up by essentially saying both “yes” — and “no.” We are getting better at quickly filtering through reams of information. We are spending fewer cognitive resource memorizing things we know we can easily find online, which theoretically leaves those resources free for other purposes. Finally, for this post, I will steer away from commenting on multitasking, because the academic jury is still very much out on that one.

But the authors also say that 

“we are shifting towards a shallow mode of learning characterized by quick scanning, reduced contemplation and memory consolidation.”

The fact is, we are spending more and more of our time scanning and clicking. There are inherent benefits to us in learning how to do that faster and more efficiently. The human brain is built to adapt and become better at the things we do all the time. But there is a price to be paid. The brain will also become less capable of doing the things we don’t do as much anymore. As the authors said, this includes actually taking the time to think.

So, in answer to the question “Is the Internet making us stupid?,” I would say no. We are just becoming smart in a different way.

But I would also say the Internet is making us less thoughtful. And that brings up a rather worrying prospect.

As I’ve said many times before, the brain thinks both fast and slow. The fast loop is brutally efficient. It is built to get stuff done in a split second, without having to think about it. Because of this, the fast loop has to be driven by what we already know or think we know. Our “fast” behaviors are necessarily bounded by the beliefs we already hold. It’s this fast loop that’s in control when we’re scanning and clicking our way through our digital environments.

But it’s the slow loop that allows us to extend our thoughts beyond our beliefs. This is where we’ll find our “open minds,” if we have such a thing. Here, we can challenge our beliefs and, if presented with enough evidence to the contrary, willingly break them down and rebuild them to update our understanding of the world. In the sense-making loop, this is called reframing.

The more time we spend “thinking fast” at the expense of “thinking slow,” the more we will become prisoners to our existing beliefs. We will be less able to consolidate and consider information that lies beyond those boundaries. We will spend more time “parsing” and less time “pondering.” As we do so, our brains will shift and change accordingly.

Ironically, our minds will change in such a way to make it exceedingly difficult to change our minds.

Missing the Mundane

I realize something: I miss the mundane.

Somewhere along the line, mundanity got a bad rap. It became a synonym for boring. But it actually means worldly. It refers to the things you experience when you’re out in the world.

And I miss that — a lot.

There is a lot of stuff that happens when we’re living our lives that we don’t give enough credit to: Petting a dog being taken for a walk. A little flirting with another human we find attractive. Doing some people-watching while we eat our bagel in a mall’s food court. Random situational humor that plays itself out on the sidewalk in front of us. Discovering that the person cutting your hair is also a Monty Python fan. Snippets of conversation — either ones we’re participating in, or ones we overhear while we wait for the bus. Running into an old acquaintance. Even being able to smile at a stranger and have them smile back at you.

The mundane is built of all those hundreds of little, inconsequential social exchanges that happen daily in a normal world that we ordinarily wouldn’t give a second thought to.

And sometimes, serendipitously, we luck upon the holy grail of mundanity — that random “thing” that makes our day.

These are the things we live for. And now, almost all of these things have been stripped from our lives.

I didn’t realize I missed them because I never assigned any importance to them. If I did a signal-to-noise ratio analysis of my life, all these things would fall in the latter category. Most of the time, I wasn’t even fully aware that they were occurring. But I now realize when you add them all up, they’re actually a big part of what I’m missing the most. And I’ve realized that because I’ve been forced to subtract them — one by one — from my life.

I have found that the mundane isn’t boring. It’s the opposite — the seasoning that adds a little flavor to my day-to-day existence.

For the past 10 months, I thought the problem was that I was missing the big things: travel, visiting loved ones, big social gatherings. And I do miss those things. But those things are the tentpoles – the infrequent, yet consequential things that we tend to hang our happiness on. We failed to realize that in between those tentpoles, there is also the fabric of everyday life that has also been eliminated.

It’s not just that we don’t have them. It’s also that we’ve tried to substitute other things for them. And those other things may be making it worse. Things like social media and way too much time spent looking at the news. Bingeing on Netflix. Forcing ourselves into awkward online Zoom encounters just because it seems like the thing to do. A suddenly developed desire to learn Portuguese, or how to bake sourdough bread.

It’s not that all these things are bad. It’s just that they’re different from what we used to consider normal — and by doing them, it reinforces the gap that lies between then and now. They add to that gnawing discontent we have with our new forced coping mechanisms.

The mundane has always leavened our lives. But now, we’ve swapped the living of our lives for being entertained — and whether it’s the news or the new show we’re bingeing, entertainment has to be overplayed. It is nothing but peaks and valleys, with no middle ground. When we actually do the living, rather than the watching, we spend the vast majority of our time in that middle ground — the mundane, which is our emotional reprieve.

I’ve also noticed my social muscles have atrophied over the past several months due to lack of exercise. It’s been ages since I’ve had to make small talk. Every encounter now — as infrequent as they are — seems awkward. Either I’m overeager, like a puppy that’s been left alone in a house all day, or I’m just not in any mood to palaver.  

Finally, it’s these everyday mundane encounters that used to give me anecdotal evidence that not all people were awful. Every day I used to see examples of small kindnesses, unexpected generosity and just plain common courtesy. Yes, there were also counterpoints to all of these, but it almost always netted out to the good. It used to reaffirm my faith in people on a daily basis.

With that source of reaffirmation gone, I have to rely on the news and social media. And — given what those two things are — I know I will only see the extremes of human nature. It’s my “angel and asshole” theory : That we all lie on a bell curve somewhere between the two, and our current situation will push us from the center closer to those two extremes. You also know that the news and social media are going to be biased towards the “asshole” end of the spectrum.

There’s a lot to be said for the mundane — and I have. So I’ll just wrap up with my hope that my life — and yours — will become a little more mundane in the not-too-distant future.

The Timeline of Factfulness

After last Wednesday, when it seemed that our reality was splitting at the seams, I was surprised to see financial markets seemed to ignore what was happening in Washington. It racked up a 1% gain. I later learned that financial markets have a history of being rather oblivious to social upheaval.

Similarly, a newsletter I subscribe to about recent academic research was packed with recent discoveries. Not one of the 35 links in that day’s edition pointed to anything remotely relevant to what was happening at that time in Washington, D.C (or various other state capitals in the country). That was less surprising to me than the collective shrugging off of events by financial markets, but it still made an interesting contrast clear to me.

These two corners of the world are not tied to the happenings of today. Markets look forward and lay economic bets on what will be. And apparently it had bet that the events of January 6 wouldn’t have any lasting impact.

Scientific journals look backward and report on what has already happened in the world of academic research. Neither are very focused on today.

But there is another reason why these two corners of the world seemed unfazed by the news headlines of January 6th. Science and the Markets are two examples of things driven by facts and data. Yes, emotion certainly plays a part. Investors have long known that irrational exuberance or fear can drive artificial bubbles or crashes. And the choice of research paths to take is a human one, which means it’s inevitably driven by emotions.

But both these ecosystems try to systematically reduce the role of emotion as much as possible by relying on facts and data. And because facts and data do not reveal their stories immediately but rather over time in the form of trends, they have to take a longer view of the world.

Therefore, these things operate on different timelines from the news. Financial markets use what’s happening now – today – as just one of many inputs into a calculated bet that will be weeks or months in the future.

Science takes a longer view, using the challenges of today to set a research agenda that may be years away from realizing its pay-off.  Both finance and science use what’s happening right now as one input to determine what will be in the future, but neither focus exclusively on today.

In contrast, that’s exactly what the news has to do. And it hyperbolizes the now, stripping the ordinary from the extraordinary, separating it, picking it out, and concentrating it for our consumption

The fact is, both markets and science have to operate by Factfulness, to use the term coined by the late Hans Rosling, Swedish physician and well known TED speaker. To run like the rest of the world, over-focused on the amplified volatility of the here and now that fills our news feeds, would be to render them dysfunctional. They couldn’t operate. They would be in a constant state of anxiety.

Increasingly, the engines that drive our world  – such as science and financial markets – have to decouple themselves from the froth and frenzy of the immediate. They do so because the rest of the world is following a very different path – one where hyper-emotionality and polarized news outlets whip us back and forth like a rag-doll caught by a Doberman.

This decoupling has accelerated thanks to the role of technology in compressing the timelines of the worldview of most of us. We are instantly alerted to what’s happening now and are then ushered into a highly biased bubble from in which we look at the world. Our world view is not only formed by emotion, it is deliberately designed to manipulate those emotions.

Emotions are our instant response to the world. They run fully hot or cold, with nary a nuance of ration to modulate them. Also, because emotions are our natural early warning systems, we tend to be hyper-aware of them and are immediately drawn to anything that promises to push our emotional buttons. As such, they are a notoriously inaccurate lens from which to look at reality.  That is why efforts are made to minimize their impact in the worlds of science and finance.

We should hold other critical systems to the same standards. Take government, for instance. Now, more than ever, we need those that govern us to be clear eyed and dealing with facts. Unfortunately, as we saw last week, they’re running as fast as they can in the opposite direction.

Happy New Year?

“Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion — as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty… So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing — that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.”

That sentiment, relevant as it is to today, was not written about 2021. It was actually written 80 years ago — in 1941 — by none other than John Steinbeck.

John was feeling a little down. I’m sure we can all relate.

It’s pretty easy to say that we have hopefully put the worst year ever behind us. I don’t know about your news feed, but mine has been like a never-ending bus tour of Dante’s 7 Circles of Hell — and I’m sitting next to the life insurance salesman from Des Moines who decided to have a Caesar salad for lunch.

An online essay by Umair Haque kind of summed up 2020 for me: “The Year of the Idiot.” In it, Haque doesn’t pull any punches,

“It was the year that a pandemic searched the ocean of human stupidity, and found, to its gleeful delight, that it appeared to be bottomless. 2020 was the year that idiots wrecked our societies.”

In case you’re not catching the drift yet, Haque goes on to say, “The average person is a massive, gigantic, malicious, selfish idiot.”

Yeah. That pretty much covers it.

Or does it? Were our societies wrecked? Is the average person truly that shitty? Is the world a vast, soul sucking, rotten-cabbage-reeking dumpster fire? Or is it just the lens we’re looking through?

If you search hard enough, you can find those who are looking through a different lens — one that happens to be backed by statistical evidence rather than what bubbles to the top of our newsfeed. One of those people is Ola Rosling. He’s carrying on the mission of his late father, Hans Rosling, who was working on the book “Factfulness” when he passed away in 2017. Bill Gates called it “one of the most educational books I’ve ever read.” And Bill reads a lot of books!

Believe it or not, if you remove a global pandemic from the equation (which, admittedly, is a whole new scale of awful) the world may actually be in better shape than it was 12 months ago. And even if you throw the pandemic into the mix, there are some glimmers of silver peeking through the clouds.

Here are some things you may have missed in your news feed:

Wild polio was eradicated from Africa. That’s big news. It’s a massive achievement that had its to-do box ticked last August. And I’m betting you never heard about it.

Also, the medical and scientific world has never before mobilized and worked together on a project like the new COVID mRNA vaccines now rolling out. Again, this is a huge step forward that will have far reaching impacts on healthcare in the future. But that’s not what the news is talking about.

Here’s another thing. At long last, it looks like the world may finally be ready to start tearing apart the layers that hide systemic racism. What we’re learning is that it may not be the idiots  — and, granted, there are many, many idiots — who are the biggest problem. It may be people like me, who have unknowingly perpetuated the system and are finally beginning to see the endemic bias baked into our culture.

These are just three big steps forward that happened in 2020. There are others. We just aren’t talking about them.

We always look on the dark side. We’re a “glass half-empty” species. That’s what Rosling’s book is about: our tendency to skip over the facts to rush to the worst possible view of things. We need no help in that regard — but we get it anyway from the news business, which, run by humans and aimed at humans, amplifies our proclivity for pessimism.

I’m as glad as anyone to see 2020 in my rear-view mirror. But I am carrying something of that year forward with me: a resolution to spend more time looking for facts and relying less on media “spun” for profit to understand the state of the world.

As we consume media, we have to remember that good news is just not as profitable as bad news. We need to broaden our view to find the facts. Hans Rosling warned us, “Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

Yes, 2020 was bad, but it was also good. And because there are forces that swing the pendulum both ways, many of the things that were good may not have happened without the bad. In the same letter in which Steinbeck expressed his pessimism about 1941, he went on to say this:

“Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man.”

There are two sides to every story, even when it’s a horror story like 2020.