4min chapter

Deep Questions with Cal Newport cover image

Ep. 227: Visions of the Deep Life?

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

CHAPTER

Is There a Town Square?

Twitter is not making the world more democratic. It does not have me. It's not helping the economy, it's not causing more innovation. Yet we're still obsessed about it. We as the regular polity shouldn't have to suffer from a Fox News or CNN reporters Twitter obsession. This is like a playground for you guys. It'sNot a town square and it's just making it worse for the rest of us. That key resource is democracy depends upon attention. Attention in a society is a collective resource that can bring on its most pressing problems. When you exhaust a population’s collective attention with things that do not matter they actually make the world less democratic.

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