Thoughts on Dopamine Culture - by Arnold Kling
With a tsunami of content provided by the Internet it is adaptive to increase our processing speed by spending less time with each item. Let me put it this way:
Recently, I came across Ted Gioia’s February essay, The Rise of Dopamine Culture, where he does not recognize shorter attention spans as adaptive. He describes a historical journey from art to entertainment to distraction/addiction. He calls the stages of this journey “slow traditional culture,” “fast modern culture,” and “dopamine.” His illustrative drawings/charts, especially the last one in his post, convey this journey.
Before movies, radio and television, a work of art was something to be contemplated. You spent a lot of time with each painting or each book.
With the mass media, each work of art took less time to consume, but we consumed more of them. (Compare a 30-minute TV program to a novel.)
Gioia’s post is mostly a rant against dopamine culture, creating an “us vs. them” narrative, where “them” is the tech companies that supply dopamine culture and profit from it. As L.M. Sacasas remarked,
