Technology is preventing us from thinking longer thoughts

Complexity is not in vogue.

Long, rational, complex thoughts are the bell-bottom pants of the thinking world. The thirst for shorter, quicker things manifests itself everywhere you turn. And it’s destroying us all. It’s turning real thoughts into bite-sized micro-thoughts.

Things like “President Barack Obama was not raised in the traditional white, two-parent nuclear family,” become “President Barack Obama is not
American.” Also, books become stories.

The complicated policies required to stem illegal immigration to the United States become “build an electric fence.” I would submit to the jury that this dumbing down of literally everything is an existential threat to humanity.

But first, the evidence.

Exhibit A: pop culture. Here, evidence is quite easy to come by. According to Cinemetrics, a website that studies filmmaking, movies have undergone a drastic change in the past century.

In 1930, the average length of a shot in a movie was more than 11 seconds. In 2005, it was closer to four seconds. Twelve percent of the shots in 1934’s “Catherine the Great” are less than three seconds long; 50 percent of the shots in 2002’s “Derailed” are less than one second long.    

Books, too, are declining in quality and length, but this is less of a new phenomenon. The average length of a sentence in Elizabethan English was 50 words; in the 1880s, it was 23 words.  

Press organizations have found that Americans today find sentences of 21 words fairly difficult.

And Colleen Lindsay, who works for the publishing company Penguin, said editors today squirm at word lengths that were the norm just ten years ago.
Exhibit B: politics. This is simple, too. The famous Lincoln-Douglas senate
debates consisted of three speeches.

The first was an hour long, the rebuttal was an hour and a half, followed by a half-hour concluding speech by the first debater. Today, moderators cut a candidate’s response off after 60 seconds.

I rarely agree with Newt Gingrich, but in the presidential debate last Wednesday he took the system to task for the monstrosity incorrectly referred to as “debating.”

He argued that asking anyone to explain their opposition to President Obama’s healthcare plan in such a small amount of time was “absurd,” and he said, if nominated as the GOP candidate, he would challenge the president to seven Lincoln-Douglas style, three-hour-long debates where discussion could take place. The mere prospect of that happening warms my heart, but sadly, it’s unlikely.

Exhibit C: the Internet, where everything good goes to die. The average person
spends less than 60 seconds on any given website. But the real culprit is Twitter.

Twitter sucks. It’s an affront to everything good in the world. The retweet function makes it so that you don’t even have to think your own idiotic thoughts.

Other people can think them for you. Twitter takes someone like me, who is frustrated by my column’s 700-word limit, and causes him to say asinine things like, “My nap game is way too next level for my own good nahmean?” Nothing of any real importance can be adequately addressed in 140 characters or less.

One of the world’s leading neuroscientists warned in 2009 that social-networking websites risk “infantilizing” our minds.

But in an era where 21 words is “fairly difficult,” a presidential candidate proposes
an electric fence along the Mexican border and end-of-life counseling for seniors becomes “death panels,” is there really any question whether or not we’ve been
infantilized?

But what’s the big deal? Movies have more action, sentences are shorter and politicians don’t talk for as long. That all actually sounds pretty cool.

Why does a guy who just wrote “Twitter sucks” think he can tell us anything about complex thoughts? These might all be valid points. I don’t know. I stopped paying attention 50 words ago.

But really, I’d encourage you to sit down and read some long, old books with
prose so boring and archaic you have to read each sentence twice. I’d recommend “The Scarlet Letter.”

Log off of Twitter and write something long and boring. Think long, boring and complex thoughts. Do it for humanity.

­— shlumorg@indiana.edu