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We’re putting our brains into neutral, and revving the engine. We’re digitally dithering, clicking on links and swimming through a torrent of useless garbage being thrown at us by idiots and self-promoters, pundits and PR flacks and marketing people.

We’re immersing ourselves in games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, obsessing about earning energy packs, spending billions of dollars on virtual gardening tools.

We’re turning the world around us into a videogame, using sites like Foursquare to tell our friends where we’re eating lunch, and competing to see who can become “mayor” of some restaurant.

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, Glenn Beck has become an influential television commentator, and Sarah Palin is a credible candidate for president in 2012. You think this is a coincidence?

No way. What’s happening is this: we are being so overwhelmed by the noise and junk zooming past us that we’re becoming immune to it. We’ve become a nation of Internet-powered imbeciles, with an ever-lower threshold for inanity.

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Lyons, on why Obama’s right on that whole ‘put down your iPad’ thing. (via newsweek) (via danielholter) (via ericmortensen) (via mikehudack)

Rafer sez:
Horse Puckey.

The same reactionist fear on the part of old people happened with TV and every other new media since the dawn of time. Beck and Palin exist due to the utterly corrupt lobbyist and campaign finance systems in the US.

Stop being silly and get back to work.