Paul on Net Repetition, Rowdy Town Hall Meetings, Your Neighbor as Brad Pitt, and Brain Evolution

Over the last couple weeks, town hall meetings have been held across the country to give information about the health care reform congress is trying to pass.  The meetings have been big news because they generate high levels of emotion.  While I know that people get more sensitive in a chaotic economy, I wonder how all this drama sprouts up so suddenly, like a dormant beast just waiting to rear its head.  It seems to me that the drawn out process of getting the health care bill approved has maybe given people too much time to mull the issues.  We read endless–and often paranoid–speculation on what will happen if we socialize healthcare.  The government will start euthanizing the elderly, abortions rates will skyrocket, health care will be rationed, people will become doctors after a one month training course, and so on and so on.

Like so many “big” stories, most of what we gather about the health care proposal from the internet.  The repetition of information is rampant: a headline is reported, tweeted, commented on, recycled through status updates, blogged about, re-tweeted, parodied, dugg, and pundited.  Though all of it centers around a single event, our brain (at least in part) registers all the repetition as separate events.  So even though just one stressful thing has happened, it feels like several. The overload which occurs creates emotional responses that are out of sync with the size of the actual event or story.

Human brains, as of now, are still not equipped to process thousands of images and words a day that have little immediate bearing on our physical situation.  Maybe we can facilitate our own evolution by training our minds to digest the web vibrations at a lower frequency.

Killin’ It is remembering that anything repeated hundreds of times on the web can stir these amplified emotional levels; it’s  a little like the equivalent of your neighbor suddenly becoming a Brad Pitt level celebrity because he/she is the subject of a single viral story.  Good for your neighbor, but bad for public understanding.  You have to remember to peel back a few layers of public frenzy anytime it erupts.

Balance the presence of the web in your life with a balanced life of web presence.  That makes no sense, right?  But read it 100 times and it will start to seem like poetry. Killlin’ It!