Things I've Said About Zengotita

Reading Zengotita’s article, I couldn’t escape making comparisons between his analysis of how people’s minds work and my own observations from my media-free day report. Zengotita’s argument, in a nutshell, was that people got over their emotional response to September 11 so quickly because the events from September 11 were merely pieces of information trying to sustain relevance in a culture where information is so disposable. And information is disposable, he explained, because of peoples’ needs to keep their minds in motion with new information to concentrate on. His article struck a chord with me and how my mind worked. I wrote that my mind is impatient and always needing something to consume, never discriminating what information is being fed to it, consequential or true or otherwise.

The thing is: a big reason why my mind needs information is because it’s so spoiled. My iPhone lets me check my e-mail and listen to music at literally any moment of the day. The media—and information—is so available to me at such large quantities that my mind can be kept occupied during any moment of boredom. Zengotita wrote that this was a big difference from societies, oh say, two hundred years ago when media wasn’t advanced enough to inform the masses of major developments so quickly. And with the development of the media, the masses can be served information in both increased speed and quantity. We’re told on the fly of developments so substantial as September 11 and so trivial as celebrity gossip. And they’re both reported with such importance: reporters around the same time telling me the fact that Ben Affleck is dating Jennifer Lopez is the most important information that I need to know right now. All information is suited with hyperbole that it numbs our senses, so that when something as truly evocative as September 11 happens, then we can’t respond to it in earnest. Or at least we can’t maintain our response in earnest before getting on with our lives and concentrating on the the next thing. Information in this age has become a product; our minds are so used to being fed this product of artificial importance, that when something real happens then we treat it with the same disposability.

So, to sum up, I thought Zengotita’s observations were great because they nailed how I saw my own mind and how it worked so impatiently. And to his credit, his article was a much more pleasant read than previous assignments.