The choice between infotainment and philosophy for busy consumers
Marshall McLuhan famously said that the medium is the message, which means that the technology used to present content sets some of the content’s parameters. Thus, we can learn about the kinds of content that are popular in an era by recognizing the limits of the technology that conveys the information.
There’s an enormous difference, for instance, between books and tweets. The invention of the printing press led to the mass production of texts, bringing down the costs of long-form writing. Writing was no longer the reserve of the elite few who were literate, as in the ancient world, or of the domineering priesthood in the Middle Ages. With the spread of liberal values and the capitalist growth of economies, what we might think of as a neoshamanic quest for “spiritual” self-knowledge was democratized. The average person could pick up a book and learn something, or fire his or her imagination with the free flow of information.
The scientific revolution, too, affected content in the Age of Reason since scientists demonstrated reason’s power. Authors of nonfiction wrote under science’s shadow, so they had to argue for their opinions or explain their theories, or at least make their writing seem reasonable…