Annie Tsai

I don’t watch much tv at all, so I’m no good when it comes to pop culture or what happened on the latest episode of this or that, or bar trivia. My family and I attended the Daily Journal company picnic over the summer and we played this fun ice breaker game where there was a celebrity on a post-it on your back and everyone around you would sort of give you not too obvious clues for you to guess who it was. 

I had the hardest time guessing my person. My celebrity was a judge on The Voice. Kelly Clarkson? No. Then other people came by and started singing. Ahh most of the music I know is early 90’s or earlier… sorry? That didn’t help, but was very lovely! This person performed at the last presidential inauguration. Shrug? Then my husband walks by, looks at my Post-it, looks at the blank look on my face from all these obvious-to-everyone-else clues, chuckles, and knows immediately what clue to give me. 

Chrissy Teigan’s husband. Ahh, John Legend. I knew this because I read about their struggles with having kids over the years. Having had two difficult pregnancies myself where I spent a month in the hospital each time, I admired her for being willing to be a storyteller of such an emotionally gutting time. It is so painful to relive every time I talk about it, and yet when I do share it with someone who has experienced something similar, it is a powerful bond because so few women open up about these extremely vulnerable and scary moments. So anyway, that’s how I know about John Legend. 

Back to not watching tv or knowing much about current events or pop culture. Frankly, a lot of stuff seems to happen when I’m busy, like trying to take advantage of the few hours that I have on weeknights after work to feed and engage with my kids before bedtime. So of course, I didn’t watch the Vice Presidential Debates live, or the Presidential Debates, or anything, really. 

Admittedly, we have started to let Bluey sneak into our home here and there, which is at this moment in time the only piece of content that all four of the humans in our home can agree on watching. Bluey.

It’s not that I completely miss out on current events, because I do read and research a lot after the fact. And I’ve noticed that there is a material difference between how commentary and events of note are messaged over video as compared to in written form. Have you noticed that, too? 

Live and recorded video based messaging (watching TV, YouTube, etc.) is optimized for shorter attention spans with ever faster frames and punchier lines. The message must be communicated before drop-off and there is a systematic arch to the clip that’s designed to draw you in and keep you there long enough because there are advertising impression dollars at stake.  Written commentary, on the other hand, often stays on a topic for longer and has more space to contemplate things more deeply. Writers are often paid for pieces to hit a certain length and time on page matters for ad impressions so longer is often better.

Now that isn’t to say that the various mediums for information delivery and absorption don’t have their place in the ethos of communication. They certainly do. However, if we rely too much on one thing – social media or one specific news channel, newspaper, or podcast – then we run the risk of only getting a piece of the puzzle when there almost always is more worth knowing than the medium affords us.

With video and streaming in particular, I worry that an over reliance trains our brains to only respond to hot takes and all caps and exclamation points. Only the most simplistic form of anything can ever be communicated in a 30 second spot or 160 characters. Sometimes, that’s all people want you to see, and I might argue that this devoids us of the nuance of humanity and the opportunity to actually connect and learn from each other. 

I think if we did that last bit more, we might find that we agree on more things than we think we do.

Now, on to the obvious: Early voting has started in about half of our nation’s states. 

It’s been truly a breath of fresh air to see people from opposing sides stand next to each other and have real conversations. Here we are, after a decade of increasingly divisive rhetoric including an inability to support a peaceful transfer of power, and Bernie Sanders and Dick Cheney perhaps for the first time in their 83 years of life are on the same side. 

Please vote.