“The only time I watch TV news now is when I’m staying in a hotel and I feel so old….There’s the stock ticker and the news crawl and those flashing graphics and eight heads screaming at each other and one’s in Tel Aviv and the other in Atlanta. It’s crazy. But after a week of it, I find myself craving it. I find my brain expanding in that chaos.”
–Composer Nico Muhly in this morning’s Wall Street Journal
Our brains may “expand” with all this stimulation, but the question is whether that kind of expansion is any sort of improvement. What Muhly describes is more of an addictive response to stimulation. My instincts tell me that the huge availability of information has coincided with a marked decline in the general population’s ability to reason carefully and in a disciplined manner. We are much more susceptible to being preyed upon by electronic purveyors of a kind of mob psychology. Sometimes, especially when one looks at the public debate on complex policy issues, it seems we all could be convinced to rush the jail, take the prisoners out and string ’em up if a few well-placed, irresponsible persons with a bullhorn repetitively urged us to do so.