Custardy content muzak and Seth’s candy diet – @thisisseth

Here’s an interesting post from Seth Godin that should resonate with everyone: the dumbing down of media.

It’s something that is all too familiar in business written content, too. In fear of losing audience, there is relentless pressure to make things simpler, to always aim for the warm custard of cognitive fluency. The problem is that, like lift muzak, the result is mildly inoffensive but wholly unmemorable.

Fluency is important, but it’s the friction that makes the mind dig in, make an effort and retain what is said. (And I would like you all to understand that my string of custardy, muzaky, frictiony mixed metaphors was a deliberate piece of disfluency to aid retention. It was.)

Here’s Seth:

“The economics seem to be that the only way to make a living is to reach a lot of people and the only way to reach a lot of people is to race to the bottom, seek out quick clicks, make it easy to swallow, reinforce existing beliefs, keep it short, make it sort of fun, or prurient, or urgent, and most of all, dumb it down.

And that’s the true danger of anti-intellectualism. While it’s foolish to choose to be stupid, it’s cultural suicide to decide that insights, theories and truth don’t actually matter. If we don’t care to learn more, we won’t spend time or resources on knowledge.

We can survive if we eat candy for an entire day, but if we put the greenmarkets out of business along the way, all that’s left is candy.”