[T]here’s a downside to all this. Actually, there are several downsides—assuming something can have more than one downside in three-dimensional space. First, it’s not just that we’re drowning in fluff, it’s that everything is being flattened. The human brain has only so much capacity for attention. And every day we’re barraged with fluff like flak over shock-and-awe in Baghdad. The ratio of noise to signal is becoming overwhelming, to the point that it’s hard to figure out what’s truly important because we’ve become accustomed to thinking that whatever grabs our attention must be.He's not wrong.
In this context, we fall back on familiar patterns that allow us to make sense of the chatter. I’m trying to avoid the word “narrative” these days, given how overused it is, but I can’t think of a better one. It’s as if editors tell their staff, “Scour the internet for anecdotes that support conclusions our audience has already reached.”
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