We currently live under extremely heavy information overload. Constantly, day by day, 24/7.
I'm fairly sure this is intentional.
For example, average lifespan of Reddit post is about a day, maybe a bit more. All of social media is constantly regurgitating the same points over and over, arguing about the same topics over and over again, ad infinitum. Which is exactly the point of it all. Create overload so heavy and intense, that nothing really matters anymore.
Human mind is incapable to operate properly under such pressure. There's tons of info unloaded into our heads daily. Good info, bad info. Wholesome info, unwholesome info. Most importantly, lots of it. Hell, I can't even remember when was the last time I was actually bored. Like, not intentionally going out to touch grass or consciously avoiding media, but simply bored... with nothing to do. That kind of thing simply does not happen anymore. There is no reflection, no idle thinking about this or that, unless one consciously decides to do that.
That's the reason why instead of relying on facts, logic, rationality and common sense, most people simply give up and resort to trusting some kind of authority. For some it is government or science. For others it could be some kind of new-age guru or some other truth sayer. It does not matter. What matters is that people have outsourced their reason to someone else. Which is exactly how they want it to be.
In Soviet Russia one single article criticizing the government could travel underground from hand to hand for years. It would be read and reread. It would be illegally reprinted or even rewritten by hand. These days, however, a single article no matter how truthful or how damaging does not mean anything. Hell, even ten or hundred articles mean almost nothing. Everything is being reduced to screaming contest. Whoever makes the loudest or most authoritative scream wins.
TLDR: Constant informational buzz is a psyop of sorts. It is being created intentionally in order to suppress clear and rational though process, to prevent masses from thinking for themselves.
Of course, it is intentional.
One very big pet peeve of mine is the news ticker at the bottom of news broadcasts. I rarely watch any news to get information, as they all are despicable. Once they've lied about anything whatsoever, why trust them about anything?
One day, I happened to be over at my mother's house watching some news broadcast, and a lightbulb went off in my head when I started thinking about a person's mental state when trying to focus on multiple sources of information being received simultaneously, and I figured there had to be something to it, having the ticker, virtually, on every news broadcast I could think of.
Lo and behold, and not that long into looking into it, surprisingly, I found way more than I could have ever imagined.
I searched something like "when was the first news ticker debuted", and on Wikipedia, of all places, I found that 25 News stations simultaneously debuted the news ticker. That part, of course, is very, very suspect. The day they debuted the news ticker?
September 11, 2001
This is a very good find indeed. Didn't know about that.
Yeah, I hate those tickers as well. There's really no other purpose for them except to distract and prevent occurence any clear thought. As soon as you start concentrating on some topic there's an immediate distraction in a form of a ticker. And then there's adverts and various other unrelated bits of information all thrown at you in a haphazard manner.
Lately I've started to ask people I visit to kindly switch off TV when I'm there. Or at the very least, to avoid that thing they call the news.