Social media is keeping us stuck in the moment

We could use better tools, too. Since their very design affects how we use them, how about forms of social media that don’t focus so narrowly on what’s happening right this instant?

Paper accelerated the spread of ideas. It was great for memes.

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.”

When we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.

Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checki... See more

If you asked me what the true danger about social media is, I’d say it’s much more subtle. It’s the problem of time—and becoming stuck in the present. It’s the relentless pressure of reverse chron.

How about this: When I post about a subject, have the social network show me powerful, useful related posts and threads from weeks, months, or even years gone by. Or remind me of thoughts or ideas I myself posted on the subject from years past; connect me with the history and trajectory of my own cognition.

We have to learn to enjoy what’s powerful and delightful about online tools, but to resist their casino-like seductions into the here and now. Some of society’s biggest problems, such as global warming, require careful long-term planning; we can’t tackle them if we’re being dragged in 20 directions every hour by shiny objects and oven-fresh hot tak... See more

But paper also, Innis pointed out, made ideas transient. That’s because, compared to clay tablets, paper isn’t very durable. It fades, it gets ripped; the Library of Alexandria burns. Perhaps worse, from Innis’s point of view, is paper encouraged disposability. Once newspaper printing presses started cranking in 17th century—pushed into overdrive b... See more

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.