Social media and attention spans: Welcome to the idiocracy

In news that won’t shock anyone who engages with comments on social media or Married at First Sight, human intelligence is declining. The Financial Times reported the downward trend of literacy and numeracy in both kids and adults, as found by the OECD. It appears to be “a broader erosion in human capacity for mental focus and application”, John Burn-Murdoch writes.

I relate entirely to this as I watch an erosion of my mental faculties brought about by a diet of clickbait and Instagram reels. I recently embarked on a 90-minute commute into the city to complete my LANTITE, the initial teacher training literacy and numeracy test, only to be told on arrival that I’d registered to take the test the previous day, which I’d missed. The irony wasn’t lost; I couldn’t even get to the test that would assess my basic literacy and numeracy on the right day.

While we’re a way off the dystopian vision of Mike Judge’s delightfully politically incorrect 2006 film Idiocracy, which is set in 2505 and in which the average intelligence of humans plummet because all the career-focused people held off on procreating until it was too late, we might be heading in that direction.

Which is fine, right? Isn’t ignorance bliss? Like the future humans in Idiocracy, we’ll be content watching shows called “Ow, My Balls”, drinking Powerade instead of water (because electrolytes) and tattooing ourselves with barcodes so our hedonistic consumerism can go unhindered. It’s like the Darwin Awards in reverse, which honour people who improve the human gene pool by removing themselves from it “in a spectacular manner”, such as Garry Hoy in 1993, who tried to demonstrate that a building’s windows were unbreakable by throwing himself at them. While the glass didn’t break, the window frame gave way, and he fell to his death. We now have the very modern category of Darwin Awards in the selfie death, when people’s quest for visual perfection overrides the part of their brain that tells them they shouldn’t hang their body out of a train.

I’ve never considered intelligence the benchmark of human achievement anyway, even though you couldn’t tell from interactions with my five-year-old daughter. She comes home from school telling us that “C-A-T spells cat” and we gush about how smart she is, as though she’s discovered the solution to climate change. I was never the “smart” kid, but I’ve always had an insatiable sense of curiosity, which has served me well, even as I feel it dulled by the constant assault of informational junk food. While I’m not yet a Powerade-chugging bonehead who watches “Ow, My Balls”, I’ll happily sit through Married at First Sight in ignorant bliss to the absolute idiocy of manufactured drama because it’s easier than reading something meaty.

Many factors contribute to this cognitive decline; for one, our loss of capacity for deep reading, not just widely as we do by skimming Wikipedia pages for a snapshot of people, events or even scientific phenomena. In her book Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf expresses concern about the “insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, [and] the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters”. Wolf is worried about our “over-reliance on external sources of information”.

In other words, we’re saturated with more information than our ancestors could have dreamt of, but we’re losing the critical faculties to know what to do with it. Hot-button issues such as the conflict in Gaza have turned black and white, swiftly dividing people into tribalistic camps with no comprehension of the geopolitical, historical and religious context of the warring sides.

It’s an adage rooted in ancient literature, such as the Bible and Socrates’ writings: ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. But we don’t feel ignorant. How could we, living in the technologically advanced First World, where artificial intelligence can churn out books, solve complex equations and pass medical exams?