the White House took a jab at him<\/a>, despite the reality that Obama was out golfing at about the same time.\u00a0 And the Republicans are ranting about Obama being out of the office as well.\u00a0 The premise seems to be that there is a crisis on, and these guys shouldn’t be out of the office until it’s over.<\/p>\nOkay, on the one hand I get that from a public relations standpoint it’s risky to be seen having fun while others are suffering.\u00a0 It’s perhaps emotionally tone deaf.\u00a0 But practically, it’s irrelevant.\u00a0 The CEO, whether of a company or a country, is not playing an active minute-by-minute role in resolving a crisis like the oil spill in the Gulf.\u00a0 Even having them in the area for moral support is logistically intrusive.\u00a0 Their role is limited to making strategic decisions that others actually implement.\u00a0 This happens on a time scale of days or weeks and can occur from anywhere.<\/p>\n
While I certainly don’t have anything close to the scope of responsibility of a CEO (nor the paycheck or the support staff), my boss knows how to find me pretty much 24×7.\u00a0 If something requires my attention, you can be sure I’ll be hunted down with little effort.\u00a0 Are we to believe that these executives are completely out of pocket while on the links or the high seas?\u00a0 Not a chance.\u00a0 This is just about how it looks.<\/p>\n
And it doesn’t really stop there.\u00a0 Whether it’s the latest sex scandal or who said what into a live mic, there is a relentless coverage of minutiae that has some emotional resonance to it.\u00a0 Is this because it’s what people want?\u00a0 I think the answer is no, but it is delivered in the package people want.<\/p>\n
As a nation, we have become the embodiment of the short attention span.\u00a0 If you can’t express it in a sound bite or a Tweet, we don’t have time for it. Yet this by itself isn’t so bad.\u00a0 Absorbing a lot of bits can be just as informative as digesting a comprehensive analysis.\u00a0 Perhaps even more enlightening in that you are getting more diverse points of view.\u00a0 But the bits by themselves don’t naturally coalesce. And most people don’t spend the effort to ever sit and reflect on the plethora of info bursts they are getting to try to distill any larger coherence out of it.\u00a0 So the reality is they are just left with the individual bits.\u00a0 And therein lies the rub.<\/p>\n
If you need to communicate something quickly, you don’t appeal to the intellect, you appeal to the emotion.\u00a0 You can spend all evening explaining the dangers of touching a hot stove to a young child.\u00a0 But if you’ve only got two minutes to teach him, you can take him over and stick his finger briefly on the burner.\u00a0\u00a0 Lesson done.<\/p>\n
Now politics isn’t so black and white as touching stoves.\u00a0 (It’s hard to find pundits willing to stand on the side of scorching hands.)\u00a0 It’s not strictly good vs. bad.\u00a0 Both sides of an issue get boiled down to emotionally charged tidbits.\u00a0 And without additional data or the time and motivation to seek the data on your own, you’re making judgments not on the issues, but on the emotional resonance of the sound bite, or perhaps the perceived trustworthiness of the speaker or source.<\/p>\n
But wait a minute… isn’t that just marketing?\u00a0 The “Mad Men” of the 50’s and 60’s created modern marketing.\u00a0 Ignore the head, play to the heart.\u00a0 Will Geico really save you $500 in 15 minutes?\u00a0 Do you really not believe it’s not butter?\u00a0 Will Axe body spray really cause hot girls to throw themselves at you?\u00a0 A wise consumer is more than a little skeptical.\u00a0 In recent decades we’ve come to somewhat distrust ads by default.\u00a0 We assume everyone is overplaying their hand.<\/p>\n
But now news and politics are being marketed using the same techniques.\u00a0 Yet we’re still in that naive phase where we largely assume what they are telling us is true.\u00a0 Yet maybe this gives us some hope after all.\u00a0 We learned to distrust product ads and do our own research.\u00a0 Maybe we’ll mature to that point in the realm of news and politics as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’ve ceased to care about substance anymore.\u00a0 All we care about, or at least all we talk about, is what<\/p>\n
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