Nous ne lisons plus, nous nous validons

Le professeur de philosophie Mark Kingwell propose un texte dans le Globe & Mail cette fin de semaine. Dans celui-ci, il discute de la surabondance de textes et de données dans le monde numérique tandis que la vraie lecture exigeante décline. Il soutient que notre communication devient surtout une quête d’affirmation de soi. Voici l’extrait que je retiens (en anglais) :

We speak blithely of an “attention economy,” as if we already knew what attention was: some fixed scarce good that can be harvested for profit. But even if we could precisely measure how much time you spend here, we misunderstand the idea of attention if we mean this scattering of monetized distraction and information-gathering. The communications theorist Andrey Mir, updating some insights from Marshall McLuhan, gives us a good diagnosis of our world awash in graphemes but with so little sense-making.

“With the proliferation of digital speech, communication reversed from information to affirmation,” he notes of our odd digital-oral mediascape. “We post to reaffirm our standing in the digital tribe. By enabling rapid status gain, digital media serve the highest need in [Abraham] Maslow’s hierarchy [of needs] – self-actualization. They create an affordance for physically and socially unlimited requests for affirmation. They even automate affirmative responses – through the button ‘like’ and the like.”