Motus Mentis

The boffins at the University of California have just alerted us that use of Twitter may imperil our moral faculties. Apparently the problem is that no sooner has the popular messaging service delivered to us a 140-character synopsis of some calamity than another “tweet” comes along, driving the old one from our consciousness before we “can fully digest the anguish and suffering.”

In other words, our Twitter stream might look like this:

Tiffany: OMG the new Jonas Bros vid is so freakin awesome (3:17 p.m.)

CAmanpour: Massive flooding, suicide bombings, Ebola outbreak complicate asteroid-impact relief efforts in Darfur (3:19 p.m.)

Jimbo: Hey, I’m gonna go get a beer down at the Baby Doll — anybody comin’?… (3:20 p.m.)

I can see their point: a few seconds before I might have fully digested the moral dimensions of Ms. Amanpour’s entry, I’ve already started thinking about heading off to have a brew with my buddy Jim.

This is nothing new, however; I imagine people made the same glum predictions once upon a time about newspapers (and then telegraphs, radio, TV, etc.). The sad fact is that our moral apparatus, designed to bind human groups at the scale of families, tribes, and villages, is entirely inadequate to encompass all the woes of the world, even if we were to spend the better part of an hour trying.

We read:

New findings show that the streams of information provided by social networking sites are too fast for the brain’s “moral compass” to process and could harm young people’s emotional development. … “If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,” said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

I quite agree that there is a problem here, but I hardly think it has only just arisen with the advent of Twitter. Before I even arrive at my office each day, my survey of the morning paper has already brought to my cognitive doorstep a ghastly summary of tragedy and misfortune affecting thousands or millions of people. Does Ms. Immordino-Yang imagine that by the time I sit down to begin the day’s toil I have, thanks to the comparatively glacial tempo of the newsprint medium, “fully experienced” an appropriate bouquet of emotions about the “psychological states” of entire populations of suffering wretches?

No, the moral erosion lamented in this article — an inevitable consequence of global communication — has been proceeding apace for centuries. Twitter, providing a useful modern convenience, simply makes it available to the increasing number of people who lack the attention-span for television.