FDR was the first president to make effective use of radio to get his points across to people, and I believe that JFK was the first one to make similar use of television. Trump will likely go down in history as the first president to do the same thing with social media. Not just any social media either, Twitter! Of all the different social media options out there, why do you suppose he chose Twitter? I have never been to that site, but I understand that postings are limited to something like 44 characters each. The first time I heard about it I thought it was a stupid idea that wouldn't last for long, but it did. Maybe it's because people have shorter attention spans nowadays, having grown up on 30 second news bites, 20 second commercials, and sitcom dialogs that consist largely of smart alecky one liners.
The dumbing down of America has been going on for some time now, but is that the cause or the effect of the short attention span, or are they both flip sides of the same coin? Who started this trend anyway? Was it the Russians, back in the days of the Cold War? That seems to be about the time it started, but there were other things going on in those days, so it might be just a coincidence. Maybe nobody did this to us on purpose, maybe it was the track that human evolution spontaneously took. After all, cognitive intelligence hasn't been around long enough, in evolutionary time, to establish that it is a survival advantage. I understand that cock roaches have been on the planet longer than humans, and they're not very smart. They say that dinosaurs weren't very bright either, but that's compared to us. They were probably the smartest creatures on Earth in their day, and that didn't save them.
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