Note the expression, pay attention. You should take this pretty literally. The cost of taking in new information is the attention you have to pay to process that information.
Like paying three dollars for a caffeinated drink, you’re paying three seconds or three minutes or three hours for some bit of information. So the question you have to ask yourself is this: Is it worth it? Since attention is finite—the class will end, the day will end, the year will end, even life will end—is the thing you’re paying attention to worth the time you’re giving it?
Socrates famously worried about the invention of writing for the way it would change what it means to know something. If Socrates was worried about moving from an oral culture to a literary culture, an analogous concern today might be about moving from a literary culture to a culture of image and video.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist The embedded claim is that our emotional and psychological lives are not keeping pace with our technological development; our psychologies are still climbing out of an ancient period of human development, but our tech is not.
To be literate with the media, we have to be honest about our own limits and vulnerabilities. Perhaps we spend too much time pointlessly confusing ourselves with random bits of information from strangers. Or we’re unduly influenced by emotional language and images. Perhaps we’re easily flattered. Or we’re only motivated to find support for what we already think. Maybe we’re cynical about everyone with expertise, or, conversely, have too much confidence in our own small information networks.
In 1983 Stanislav Petrov’s decision to “corroborate” the information his computer was giving him may have averted nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Petrov was the lieutenant colonel on duty at a Soviet command center responsible for monitoring Soviet early-warning satellites. When his computer told him the U.S. had just launched 5 intercontinental ballistic missiles that would make landfall in under 25 minutes, he had almost no time to react carefully….
