The State Of The American Citizen - Lost Focus, Lost Interest, And Lost Knowledge

We live in a social media world that has robbed people of their focus on what matters. As we obsessively seek access to our digital distraction devices, we are complicit in the theft of our time and our priorities.
“Distraction is a tricky thing. Often, we don’t feel like we’re distracted. In fact, we think we’re paying attention, often to multiple things at once,” Alison Pearce Stevens writes for Science News.
Our time is stolen in tiny and large increments. A person can be lost for hours at a time or lose hours in accumulated minutes during the day. The average person checks his or her phone between 80 to 144 times a day. Each of those looks takes time away from the present moment and then time to reengage with what we were doing when we gave into the compulsion to go online.
People will say they are great “multi-taskers” and that they can check information online while not losing a beat in the task that was at hand before they picked up their phone. They are wrong.
“Science has shown that we aren’t truly capable of multitasking,” Stevens writes. “Our brains evolved to stay focused on one or two things at a time. When we multitask, our brains quickly switch from one task to another. It feels seamless. But it’s not. It comes with major consequences for our ability to pay attention and think deeply about things.”
In losing all those minutes and hours to social media and incessantly checking our smartphones we are sacrificing time for what should be more important responsibilities, actions, and needs.
We pay less attention to one another and to our communities. We are less informed, and our connections with family and friends are more distant as we are pulled addictively to social media or to check the latest posts on news sites.
We also have less time to follow the news of our communities, school districts, county boards, economic development organizations, and local government bodies. We aren’t as connected to the people and events of our communities. It shows in our growing ignorance of what is happening locally.
A switch to digital means a switch to the brief sentence, the headline, which has no context or depth to explain the issue. It isn’t a switch to what we define as local news – the news of the local governments, our communities, our schools, and our people.
It is no surprise that as Americans turn more toward a life online, they are becoming less informed and less interested in following the news.
“The local news landscape in America is going through profound changes as both news consumers and producers continue to adapt to a more digital news environment,” Pew Research reports. There is a profound flaw with this conclusion.
For Pew, “local” means towns over 100,000 in population, or of a million people or more, not just our small rural communities where local is far more a reality than in a metro area. Pew’s local news communities include those with TV stations and daily newspapers.
And define news. The news of your local governments won’t be available without a reporter covering a meeting. You won’t get the debate and the questions that were asked before a decision was made. You won’t know why there was a split vote.
If the local newspaper doesn’t collect and report on your community’s news, information will be fragmented; you will have to search multiple websites regularly to stay up-to-date and ensure you don’t miss a critical meeting on a subject related to your concerns.
“The share of U.S. adults who say they are paying close attention to local news has dropped since our last major survey of attitudes toward local news in 2018, mirroring declining attention to national news,” Pew’s researchers write.
According to Pew, the percentage of people paying attention to local news has dropped from 78% to 66% over the last decade. We would guess this drop is considerably more than 12 percentage points based on falling newspaper subscriptions, lost reporters, and lost newspapers. Nationally, only 15% of Americans say they paid for a subscription to their local newspaper in the last year.
Pew says the share of Americans following local news very closely has fallen from 37% to 22%.
While not subscribing to their local community newspapers, a high percentage of the American public values and trusts their local newspaper.
“At a time when many local news outlets are struggling and Americans’ trust in the news media has waned, the vast majority of U.S. adults (85%) say local news outlets are at least somewhat important to the well-being of their local community. This includes 44% who say local journalism is extremely or very important to their community,” Pew’s survey found.
Considering the decline in attention to community news, our local governments are seeking ways to inform distracted citizens. Too often, they decide to try to compete with TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and other new digital sites. It’s a losing battle. People are seeking entertainment, shopping, or news clips from their favorite news sites. They don’t seek information about the local government, the county fair, or their community’s challenges.
“To live up to the full measure of citizenship in this nation requires not only action, but it requires intelligent action. It is necessary to secure information and to acquire education,” Presidential candidate Calvin Coolidge said in a campaign speech in 1924.
“The background of our citizenship is the meeting house and the schoolhouse, the place of religious worship and the place of intellectual training. But we cannot abandon our education at the schoolhouse door. We have to keep it up through life,” he said.
We are failing to educate our students in their civic responsibilities and failing to support news organizations that prepare citizens for participation in the decision-making discussions by our local governments.
There are costly consequences to not paying attention as too many discover too late.