Screaming extremism
Vying for attention in a high-decibel world
By Neal Gabler
Boston Globe
April 24, 2010
OVER 50 years ago a psychologist named Colin Cherry discovered a surprising phenomenon. A person could be in a room full of clusters of other people, all of them engaged in conversations, but the person could still manage somehow to block out every other conversation and focus directly on his own. Psychologists have called this the “cocktail party effect.” More recent studies have shown two other related phenomena. First of all, the maximal noise levels of daily living have increased dramatically — by a decibel a year. And second of all, ambient noise levels can reach a threshold where the cocktail party effect finally becomes inoperative, forcing people to shout to be heard above the din.
So what does this have to do with anything outside of auditory research? Just this: In a globalized informational environment where we are awash 24/7 in new bits of data, like those rising decibels, we are stuck in a kind of virtual cocktail party in which the whole world is present, all talking at the same time, all drowning out one another.
In order to get heard, you not only have to shout — you have to shout at the top of your lungs, and even that probably won’t do it. To assure yourself of attention, you have to do something so startling that you effectively stop the conversation altogether. In effect, you have to blow up the World Trade Center, or paint the streets in human blood as protesters in Thailand recently did, or threaten lawmakers and even spit on them as the Tea Partiers did, or call President Obama a traitor or a Hitler. You have to be an extremist.
We don’t usually think of extremism as a byproduct of the information age. Most analyses of the subject focus on social or psychological factors. We are told, for example, that Islamic radicals are reacting to poverty, to lack of education, to political suppression, to a sense of cultural marginalization by the West, or to religious leaders, and that their eruption is a way of redressing their perceived grievances. The problem with this analysis is that many of the radicals, most obviously Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri, were wealthy and well-educated.
(More here.)
By Neal Gabler
Boston Globe
April 24, 2010
OVER 50 years ago a psychologist named Colin Cherry discovered a surprising phenomenon. A person could be in a room full of clusters of other people, all of them engaged in conversations, but the person could still manage somehow to block out every other conversation and focus directly on his own. Psychologists have called this the “cocktail party effect.” More recent studies have shown two other related phenomena. First of all, the maximal noise levels of daily living have increased dramatically — by a decibel a year. And second of all, ambient noise levels can reach a threshold where the cocktail party effect finally becomes inoperative, forcing people to shout to be heard above the din.
So what does this have to do with anything outside of auditory research? Just this: In a globalized informational environment where we are awash 24/7 in new bits of data, like those rising decibels, we are stuck in a kind of virtual cocktail party in which the whole world is present, all talking at the same time, all drowning out one another.
In order to get heard, you not only have to shout — you have to shout at the top of your lungs, and even that probably won’t do it. To assure yourself of attention, you have to do something so startling that you effectively stop the conversation altogether. In effect, you have to blow up the World Trade Center, or paint the streets in human blood as protesters in Thailand recently did, or threaten lawmakers and even spit on them as the Tea Partiers did, or call President Obama a traitor or a Hitler. You have to be an extremist.
We don’t usually think of extremism as a byproduct of the information age. Most analyses of the subject focus on social or psychological factors. We are told, for example, that Islamic radicals are reacting to poverty, to lack of education, to political suppression, to a sense of cultural marginalization by the West, or to religious leaders, and that their eruption is a way of redressing their perceived grievances. The problem with this analysis is that many of the radicals, most obviously Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri, were wealthy and well-educated.
(More here.)
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