“I’m thinking of all those kids over all those years who watched as their first introduction to TV the rapid-fire letters on Sesame Street.”
“What’s the point? Get to the point.”
“You just made it for me. Impatience. And now impatience is daily exacerbated by the desire for a single-click website. People ask, ‘You want me to click three times to get to your site’s info?’ Sesame Street based 4,500+ episodes on the premise that children have short attention spans. The product? Rapid-fire short segments, letters popping into view for under a minute, bright colors and flashing lights that disappeared quickly as the next segment began. And one can see the effect in a society that wants an instant cure for COVID-19.”
“Wait! You’re relating Sesame Street to the pandemic somehow? There’s a non sequitur from a guy who thinks he’s mostly logical.”
“Not to the pandemic, rather to the desire for immediacy that has spilled into the mindset of a world frightened by a disease. We are among the most impatient of generations, this current lot. And many who grew up with a daily diet of Sesame Street’s short-attention-span programming are now adults seeking instant this or that: Short intense bursts of whatever. So, after a virus spread from the relatively closed society of China into the relatively open societies of the West and elsewhere, the short-attention-span generations asked, ‘Where’s the cure? Where’s the cure? Why hasn’t someone come up with a cure? Whom can we blame?’ And that immediately became a political mantra, with one side pushing that immediacy scenario onto a Sesame-Street-trained population. ‘Why, had we been in control, there would have been no pandemic.’”
“Tell me more.”
“More? If I stretch this hypothesis further, you’ll probably wander off mentally. But, shoot, I can’t stop myself. So much comes to mind, much of it digression. Like the difference between the average lengths of paragraphs in a twentieth-century Hemingway novel and an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel: Short versus long. I suppose we succumbed to brevity even before Sesame Street. The twentieth century was the Brevity Century. And now in the twenty-first century, we’re a people seeking quick fixes without realizing that not every problem has a quick fix. Seeds take time to grow. Vaccines take time to develop. Biological processes run their courses at paces not subject to will or desire. And so, we do what we often do when we’re faced with a problem: Seek a scapegoat; claim that we could have done better; wrap our fears and doubts in a blanket of personal irresponsibility, and ask, ‘How could “they” let this happen?’ and 'Why aren't they doing something already?'”
“I think I’m beginning to…Hey, did you see that article on Famotidine? Or that one on Remdesivir? And they say that Oxford just invented a vaccine that works.”
“What’s the point? Get to the point.”
“You just made it for me. Impatience. And now impatience is daily exacerbated by the desire for a single-click website. People ask, ‘You want me to click three times to get to your site’s info?’ Sesame Street based 4,500+ episodes on the premise that children have short attention spans. The product? Rapid-fire short segments, letters popping into view for under a minute, bright colors and flashing lights that disappeared quickly as the next segment began. And one can see the effect in a society that wants an instant cure for COVID-19.”
“Wait! You’re relating Sesame Street to the pandemic somehow? There’s a non sequitur from a guy who thinks he’s mostly logical.”
“Not to the pandemic, rather to the desire for immediacy that has spilled into the mindset of a world frightened by a disease. We are among the most impatient of generations, this current lot. And many who grew up with a daily diet of Sesame Street’s short-attention-span programming are now adults seeking instant this or that: Short intense bursts of whatever. So, after a virus spread from the relatively closed society of China into the relatively open societies of the West and elsewhere, the short-attention-span generations asked, ‘Where’s the cure? Where’s the cure? Why hasn’t someone come up with a cure? Whom can we blame?’ And that immediately became a political mantra, with one side pushing that immediacy scenario onto a Sesame-Street-trained population. ‘Why, had we been in control, there would have been no pandemic.’”
“Tell me more.”
“More? If I stretch this hypothesis further, you’ll probably wander off mentally. But, shoot, I can’t stop myself. So much comes to mind, much of it digression. Like the difference between the average lengths of paragraphs in a twentieth-century Hemingway novel and an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century novel: Short versus long. I suppose we succumbed to brevity even before Sesame Street. The twentieth century was the Brevity Century. And now in the twenty-first century, we’re a people seeking quick fixes without realizing that not every problem has a quick fix. Seeds take time to grow. Vaccines take time to develop. Biological processes run their courses at paces not subject to will or desire. And so, we do what we often do when we’re faced with a problem: Seek a scapegoat; claim that we could have done better; wrap our fears and doubts in a blanket of personal irresponsibility, and ask, ‘How could “they” let this happen?’ and 'Why aren't they doing something already?'”
“I think I’m beginning to…Hey, did you see that article on Famotidine? Or that one on Remdesivir? And they say that Oxford just invented a vaccine that works.”
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