How media, distraction and cognitive drift reshape national judgement and whether we can still put the pieces back together.
Introduction - A few years ago I met Adam Robinson at a conference in London. He was presenting one of the most interesting talks I have ever heard on how people make mistakes and why intelligent people are not immune. The argument stayed with me because it was simple, practical and uncomfortably accurate.
For decades I have been drawn to the work of Neil Postman. His idea that media reshapes society rather than society shaping media becomes more accurate with each passing year. Postman knew that attention is a cultural asset and explained why once it is lost the quality of public thought declines with it.
I think that Putting Robinson and Postman together (has anyone else ever done this?) creates a useful frame for understanding the world we now live in. It explains why bad decisions rise even when information is abundant and it helps clarify why the concept of stupidity is not about intelligence at all but about the environment we have built around ourselves.
Neil Postman argued that when a society’s media changes, its habits of thought change with it. Print taught us to follow a line of reasoning. Television trained us to react to images. The internet pushed us to skim. Social media pushed us to perform. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992) he went further and was way ahead of his time when he said that we risk becoming a culture in which technology dictates meaning, values and thought, rather than the other way around.
Combined with Robinson and Cipolla, Postman explains how the cognitive environment is structured to keep people in the stupid zone where we outsource parts of our judgement to AI systems we barely understand.
Postman’s point was simple.
When media changes the form of public discourse also changes.
When discourse becomes dominated by entertainment, inevitably depth and rational debate weaken.
When rational debate weakens democratic decision-making becomes thinner, more emotional and less capable of handling complexity.
This produces the cultural drift we find ourselves in now.
We know that social media do not just carry information, they shape our attention. They influence what counts as knowledge and they define what it means to think like an adult. When habits like patience, focus and proportion are edged out by constant stimulation, the quality of public thought declines. Postman argue’s that over time, that weakens a society’s ability to deal with its own problems.
We saw a version of this during the early days of COVID. People behaved in ways that made little sense on paper. Panic buying. Rumours spreading. Vaccine hesitancy and denial rising. None of it was caused by stupidity in the usual sense. It came from an environment that pushed attention to breaking point. Stress, overload and the emotional echo chamber of online life encouraged decisions that felt urgent but lacked context.
Adam Robinson’s work helps explain this. He says stupidity is not low intelligence, it’s what happens when attention collapses under pressure. Noise, novelty, fatigue and group signals shrink your field of view. Even smart people make bad calls when the world keeps them in that state. Modern media almost guarantees it. We compress everything into a crisis. We distort risk. We reward reaction over reflection. His point is that the environment produces mistakes long before the individual does.
Carlo Cipolla takes this further. He believed societies suffer most when behaviour harms both the actor and everyone around them. No malice, just poor judgement amplified by momentum. You see this in how misinformation spreads or how fear escalates online. The issue isn’t that people don’t understand the warnings, it’s that they’re too distracted and wound up to take them in. When everyone is rushing and reacting, small mistakes build into bigger ones because no one stops long enough to fix them.
Can this cognitive drift be reversed? Postman was sceptical. Once attention habits collapse, rebuilding them is hard. He feared that societies which amuse themselves to death cannot easily relearn adult thinking. Robinson is more conditional. He says that if we understand the triggers for bad decisions, we can design environments that protect bandwidth and slow thinking down. Cipolla argued that systems can survive irrationality if they recognise its power and build guardrails.
There is also a quieter argument in favour of optimism. Despite the noise, digital tools can extend our capabilities when used with intent. Scientists used global data sharing to track the COVID virus at record speed. Online communities support people who once felt isolated and information and knowledge is more accessible to the curious helping us become more capable, not less. The potential is there if we design a digital world that helps us think and is not diesigned to distract and amuse us.
So what would it take to escape the stupid zone? No society willingly slows itself down. No commercial platform volunteers to make less money. No government chooses to reduce the speed of information unless forced by crisis. That is why the list feels implausible. It asks the current system to act against its own incentives.
Real progress comes from smaller moves that build over time and education is the quickest route. Schools, universities and professional training can shift the balance from teaching pure digital fluency to teaching attention, scepticism and judgement. These are practical skills and politically neutral.
Social media platforms tend to change only when reputational pressure, regulation and public mood line up. We saw it with child protection, privacy rules and advertising transparency. Similar nudges could raise the cost of promoting noise over quality without demanding the impossible from the businesses behind them.
Institutions can also adopt simple circuit breakers. Public health agencies now treat misinformation as part of crisis management. Financial regulators use automatic trading pauses to stop panic spreading. These tools do not solve the whole problem, but they stop small fires becoming national ones.
None of this rewrites the incentives of the digital world, but it does chip away at the conditions that keep people distracted, overloaded and reactive. It is slow work and rarely visible, yet it is how cultures shift back to the norm. We shouldn’t expect perfection butew must demand steady pressure and much better guardrails.
The choice is not between a flawless system and collapse, it’s between doing nothing and doing enough to keep national judgement intact.
We are not doomed, but drift has a direction and it is not upwards. The first step is to recognise the environment that shapes our mistakes. The next is to reclaim the attention needed for clear, adult judgement which is when we can start putting the pieces back together.
Final thought - “Avoiding stupidity might be better than being smart.” Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway