Our realm of instant fact and no analysis (Gould)
June 16th, 2007 | Published in Culture, Education, Internet, Quotes, Technology, Television
The world of USA Today is a realm of instant fact and no analysis. Hundreds of bits come at us in pieces never lasting more than a few seconds—for the dumb-downers tell us that the average Americans can’t assimilate anything more complex or pay attention to anything longer.
The oddly “democratic” procedure makes all bits equal—the cat who fell off a roof in Topeka (and lived) gets the same space as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Equality is a magnificent system for human rights and morality in general, but not for the evaluation of information. We are bombarded with too much in our inordinately complex world; if we cannot sort the trivial from the profound, we are lost in terminal overload. The criteria for sorting must involve context and theory—the larger perspective that a good education provides.
–Stephen Jay Gould, “Bully for Brontosaurs” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 91