Is it me or are we seeing a recent increase in dumbing down?

I know I’ve been complaining about mainstream media for a long time but… Looking at the more hysterical fringes of the conspirasphere (as I do) I can’t help but notice all these sites seem to adopt the same near impenetrable wall-of-glossolalia approach. Nutterspeak has it’s own discrete and recognisable grammar, from Sherry Shriner to Prison Planet to every crazy posting about Satan‘s NWO chemtrails on facebook. When I see a lot of random capitalisation and breathless run-on sentences I find myself trying to imagine the tinfoil-hatted poster thumping away at their keyboard, hour after hour in an earnest crusade to wake up the sheeple.

But perhaps we adopted this tortured language in an attempt to better grab the attention of search engine indexing bots? I certainly see lifestyle bloggers adopting the same speech patterns that are explicitly laid out by SEO optimisation articles and I’ve had conversations at work with people who also notice this.

Speaking of which, have you tried to read a tabloid newspaper celebrity gossip article recently? There’s this eerie repetition of staccato, simply worded statements, repeated with slight rephrasing. I’m not going to suggest checking out the Daily Mail sidebar of shame but I’m sure you know what I mean. It’s not just the old familiar tabloid lexicon (“romp” “tot” “jibe” “boffin” if you’re in the UK) it reads like an AI learning to throw together sentences and refining them until it gets something the dumbest human will retweet.

So are we just adapting ourselves to the vagaries of the search engine algorithms, or is there an orchestrated agenda behind this newspeak?

I can completely imagine that dumber people are an easy demographic to market to. If your content is a dogwhistle for the stupid, I’m sure you can tap into a rich seam of advertising revenue. Follow the money.

In the same way, I believe political speeches are dumbed down to attract more fanatical voters and stymie useful critical discourse. Again, follow the money.

In the last few months, several analyses of political rhetoric were released which concluded that the spoken vocabulary levels of presidential candidates had contracted from previous elections, hovering around a middle school level for most candidates (compared to the high school level of Presidents Lincoln, Reagan, and others)—with a leading presidential candidate consistently speaking at a third- or fourth-grade level. More striking, however, than the shrinkage of vocabulary is the change in word use itself—with “loser,” “disgusting,” “weak,” and “idiot” getting far more airtime, along with the use of the personal pronoun. –https://www.ttf.org/blog-post/valuing-vocabulary

 

Edward Bernays/marketing horror: Everyone needs to watch this documentary “The Century of the self” Seriously, it’s a somewhat concise summary of how advertising blathered into all our lives and polluted everything. Wish they’d shown us it at highschool in the 90’s.

I’m not even going to get in to the whole freedom of speech v’s political correctness false dichotomy.

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/decay-our-language-happening

Adweek: your customers are not stupid

https://www.poynter.org/news/real-problem-clickbait

TL;DR: I dunno, ask a post-structuralist.

Full disclosure: I was actually born in 1984 and I was raised by the internet as part of a covert CIA-backed psychological experiment. I can literally only think in memes and my attention span is measured in negative numbers. And all I got was these lousy psionic powers!