Why So Much Ignorance In This Age Of Technology?

I have always thought it ironic that in this age of interconnectedness, when we have almost unlimited sources of information at our disposal, so many of us are abysmally ignorant of the things that should matter. The level of civic disengagement in North America, for example, has facilitated the devolution of so many of our democratic institutions into mere channels of undue influence for the minority, ensuring that the needs of the many are subjugated to the wants of the few. Inaction on climate change, the ongoing degradation of ecosystems, the ever-widening disparity of incomes and the erosion of social programs are but the more egregious examples of this decline.

John Cruickshank, the publisher of the Toronto Star, attributes this phenomenon to 'distraction.' In his paper, he writes about a recent Toronto Ted Talk (not yet available on the Ted site) in which he examined the problem through the lens of young people who, both in Canada and the United States, have a voter participation rate of about 40%. However, he points out that the lack of voter participation is merely the most obvious manifestation of the level of engagement:

Voting’s just the marker. More critical are civic interests, habits and knowledge: The debates in the lunchroom about taxes and spending or public meetings over a new airport or a mega-quarry. The less visible indicators of democracy’s vitality.

It’s no coincidence youth voting is so similar in the U.S. and Canada. It’s not a question of national culture. And don’t blame “the kids today.” It’s a decades-long shift. It spans generations and geography.

And it appears to be driven by the devices and content that now dominate and consume our waking lives — our smartphones and tablets, our laptops and PCs and, at least for a little while longer, our TV screens.

All of these devices, while potentially quite useful, also have a tremendous power to distract. How many times, for example, will you be at the computer when the email signal rings and you switch immediately to it? Or how about a link or a popup in an article that takes you far away from your intended purpose? (I'll just take a minute to watch that footage of George Clooney going to his Venice wedding. Oh yeah, now what was I just doing?)

All of which is to say that news has a far more tenuous grip on us than in days of yore. For Cruickshank, it becomes a simple equation:

No news habit. No engagement.

Those who have learned to pursue the news become politically active.

The drift away from substance actually began, he says, with the proliferation of cable channels that, for the less-than-committed consumer of news, offered a welcome alternative. Much Music, MTV, etc. had an allure that the nightly news didn't.

As soon as alternatives emerged, more and more younger people failed to learn news skills and habits.

They were looking for distraction, not information about the world.

But even if this population only reluctantly followed the news, their political behaviour was just like that of the most committed news junkies. They voted: 80 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls in the Canadian federal election of 1958 — the year the CBC television signal first went coast to coast.

Canadian citizens aged 65 and older were still voting at the 80-per-cent level in the federal election of 2011. But the participation rate of each successive age group Boomers, X’ers and Millennials were lower by a greater and greater margin.

Mirroring their increasing failure to develop news skills.

Cruickshank has some specific suggestions on how to reverse this terrible trend, which I will leave you to discover by reading his article.

You may also find these two brief videos about his Ted Talk of interest:

Shoulder Shrug

Like many of the commentators and bloggers whom I read, I regularly feel a deep frustration over the passivity of people. No matter what the problem, be it political, social, environmental or a host of others, too many have a 'can't-do' reaction that debases so many in a myriad of ways. Indeed, it appears to be one of our species' defining characteristics, one at which Canadians seem to particularly excel, if our current political landscape is any indication.

Perhaps we need a national shoulder-shrug symbol as an expression of the what-can-you-do paralysis that cripples so many, a condition that undoubtedly facilitates the dark manipulation our political 'masters' so gleefully engage in.

My reflections are partly prompted by a column in this morning's Toronto Star by Rick Salutin entitled David Cameron and Jim Flaherty prove fatalism is back. Using the picture of British Prime Minister David Cameron in boots wading through flood-ravaged south-west England, Salutin sums up the photo-op in these terms:

It’s the shots of British Prime Minister David Cameron slogging through the floods there in wellies that convinced me: fatalism is back. He may have looked as if he was trying to do something, but it had nothing to do with addressing the causes of flooding. He was all accommodation: like Noah building an ark after hearing from the Lord that the skies were going to burst.

That image parallels the reactions people had in Toronto and beyond after the ice storm that left so many without power for so long; rather than to start a real discussion about climate change, people instead carped about how long it took to restore power. An 'action plan' in the form of an independent panel convened by Toronto Hydro to address that concern was our way of avoiding acknowledging and confronting the real issue.

Similarly, during the flooding that hit the Toronto area last July, concern seemed to be limited to how long it took to rescue stranded Go Train passengers. Indeed, at the time Environment Canada's senior climatologist urged a stoic acceptance:

"No infrastructure could handle this...you just have to accept the fact that you're going to be flooded."

Salutin offers this observation:

... ours is the first era ever possessing strong evidence that human action has shaped the climate. It’s simply a case of trying to undo what we’ve (with high probability) done. If you had substantial evidence that food or water was killing your kids, you wouldn’t futz around about “the science” being inconclusive. You’d act.

And here he gets to the meat of his thesis:

I’m not talking about the tendency of governments, corporations and ideologues to lie and manipulate. I mean the propensity of populations to meekly accept brutal realities because that’s just how it is.

The columnist then trains his lens on the federal budget brought down the other day by Jim Flaherty, who apparently had more pressing concerns than people's lives in the days leading up to the budget:

The economy’s another example. How dared Jim Flaherty present that budget? Where did he get the balls? He ignored the state of jobs and debt in people’s lives, the way Cameron ignored climate change while wading in the water.

And so things go merrily along, collective amnesia and widespread denial being a comfortable refuge until the next 'unforseeable' crisis.