From Information Age To Attention Development Age

It’s harder than ever these days to tell fact from fiction. Our lives have become so inundated with information — some good, some bad, most biased, all partial — at the end of the day it can be hard for some people to tell up from down.

And as we spend more and more of our time on the deconstructive postmodern platforms of social media, truth becomes increasingly fragmented and balkanized and reduced to all sorts of low-resolution narratives.

All because we lack any real social mechanism for enfoldment, the process whereby multiple partial and even contradictory truths can be assembled into a more complex and coherent understanding of reality.

Take “conspiracy theories” for example. Everyone knows that genuine conspiracies occur behind the scenes all the time. We can talk about dozens of proven conspiracies that have come to light over the decades. And at the same time, we can talk about hundreds of other conspiracy theories that are just plain silly. The problem, of course, is that few of us possess the epistemic tools required to discern genuine plots from paranoia and propaganda. This can be a major problem when the Dunning-Kruger effect (the inability to discern when one is “over their heads”) confidently assures us that we do.

And so without these basic epistemic guardrails, a segment of our population has swerved off the road into conspiracy thinking, all while real-world conspiracies are taking place in plain sight, right before our very eyes.

Life in the “Information Age” seems to resemble fundamentalist religion more than some technocratic utopia:

• Separates people into “believers” and “non-believers”
• Reduces meta-systemic complexity, real-world pressures, and power dynamics to oversimplified black-and-white narratives
• Only supports data that reinforces their narrative beliefs, and rejects data that goes against that narrative
• Resists ambiguity and prefers narratives that create a false sense of certainty

This may be because we really aren’t in the Information Age at all, and haven’t been for some time — we are now living in the “Attention Age” where depth is replaced by volume, where facts are replaced by feelings, and where an increasingly noisy minority sets the frame and tone for everyone else.

~ Dr. Carlos Warter, MD