Mind Cafe’s Infantilizing Standards

Optimism and infotainment as excuses for mediocre writing

Conversational writing is all the rage on the internet. These days the most successful freelance writers keep their writing simple, breezy, and upbeat. But what does this style of writing say about how the internet is affecting our standards?

Marshall McLuhan said “the medium is the message”: what we say may not be as important as why we’re inclined to say it that way to adapt to a technological environment. Before the new media of radio, television, and computers, writing was king. In the ancient world most people were illiterate, so they passed on folklore in an oral culture. For the elites, though, writing was the premier means of communicating their thoughts, as represented by religious scriptures.

Eventually, the invention of the printing press made for a more popular format of writing, but the elitist values of literary culture persisted so that up until television and the internet, writers tended to make the most out of language. A wide vocabulary was a must when writers wrote with a quill, for example, and there was no presumption that readers needed their hands held with short sentences and baby paragraphs. Attention spans were long, unmolested by our “high” technologies of frantic entertainment.

Indeed, audiovisual media compete with language. Instead of saying what you mean, you can now show it with illustrations and dramatizations. Radio, television, and movies are more entertaining than reading in that the former put the viewer into a passive role: everything is shown to the viewer, leaving nothing to his or her imagination.

Reading is harder work because words are abstract symbols. To understand what’s being said on the page, you need to have mastered the language and grasped fine conceptual distinctions. Writing and reading are forms of thinking, whereas when you’re watching TV or a movie, your senses are occupied, leaving you few cognitive resources to ponder what’s being presented.

Then came the computer, the digitization of content, the internet, and the smartphone which mash together all these media, and which transmit our messages to the four corners of the earth. When you digitize content you reduce it to a computer code, to a series of ones and zeroes which enables even unconscious machines to copy and to paste the vast library of humanity in the blink of an eye.

Do you want to send someone a digital copy of the Bible? How about the Gnostic Nag Hammadi library? Once digitized, you can duplicate and proliferate those works with just a few clicks of the mouse buttons, whereas it used to take an army of copyists months or longer to reproduce them by hand.

This greater power over writing we now have may be a Faustian bargain, though, because we’re liable to be spoiled as the texts we so freely distribute are naturally trivialized. We can’t help but take for granted what comes to us so easily, so we treat the abundant resource of words as disposable. When there’s an oversupply of something, its value plummets.

Keep it Upbeat: The Cult of Happiness

Keep those trends in mind as we look, by way of illustration, at the submission guidelines for Mind Cafe, a popular publication for freelance writers. The guidelines say that each article should “teach your readers how to live a better, happier life,” “draw upon external support to reinforce your claims,” and “have a clear and actionable takeaway.”

The second requirement that your points should be backed up by research seems like a legacy of old-fashioned literary culture, of the standards that prevailed before the age of fake news, infotainment, and postmodern relativism. The first and the third requirements are more revealing since they’re consistent with a lowering of intellectual standards, but you have to read between the lines to see what’s going on here.

To say that a writer should always tell the reader how to be better and happier is to say the writer should always be upbeat. But why should a writer be that way? Isn’t there a venerable tradition of melancholy in the arts? Why should pessimism or unwavering criticism be forbidden?

The obvious answer is that negativity no longer sells well. Readers want to be reassured, not berated. And that’s because we’re spoiled by our technologies so we can no longer handle reality as it exists outside the bubble of our illusory self-image. We no longer master the skills of critical thinking but defer to the internet or to celebrity influencers to do our thinking for us. We succumb to confirmation bias and retreat to information silos, to echo chambers that radicalize, tribalize, and infantilize us.

On average, we postindustrial consumers are proud, vain, narcissistic babies that presume we can do no wrong, so we dismiss anything that threatens to upset our mental high. If we entertain a downer like the problem of environmentalism, we’re quick to commodify and to belittle the message, reducing our obligation to the act of giving the environmentalist a like on Facebook or of “recycling” our plastics so they’ll end up as mountains of trash in poor, faraway countries. “No downers, please!” seems to be a prudent principle only for blessed folks who live in a society that has no serious, structural problems.

But there’s another reason why readers would prefer to read only uplifting content, which is that we’re reading this oversupply of low-cost articles only for entertainment, to relax after work. Reading for us isn’t a serious business because, as I said, the digital presentation trivializes the content, but also because our main occupation is subject to the dynamics of capitalism. Most folks don’t have their dream job, but struggle to earn a living in a role which alienates them in the Marxian sense: our jobs are often meaningless and precarious since a machine could do the work better, and most of the profits go to a minority of rich owners or managers.

As a result of being overworked or disenchanted with life under capitalism, most of these readers just want to relax. We don’t want our precious illusions threatened, nor our downtime wasted on anything educational. We left school and got a job, so we presume we have nothing left to learn. We readers could just as easily be watching Netflix, checking our Facebook feed, or playing a video game.

Thus, writers compete now with these more addictive forms of entertainment, and we do so by writing infotainment. So back up your claims with research, but above all keep your claims upbeat — or your reader will wander off to watch cute cat videos on YouTube.

Indeed, the editor at Mind Cafe is explicit: “we’d like you to keep your article engaging — so mix things up. Balance short, snappy sentences and longer, more informative ones to keep your reader interested. Make it flow. Keep it exciting.”

That’s the editor’s emphasis at the end there, in case you were wondering.

Neoliberal Praxis: The Illusion of Actionable Takeaways

The third requirement fits into these same themes. To ask for a clear and actionable takeaway is to imply that the writer should address only questions that have simple, clear-cut, practical answers — which rules out philosophy as well as radical criticism. This amounts to a narrowing of concerns to reinforce the reader’s sense that her society is progressive.

To be sure, it’s possible to solve a problem by writing a how-to manual or a useful formula or recipe to instruct the reader how to achieve some result by following a series of reliable steps. The internet has been a boon in cutting out middlemen, by informing folks how to fix their leaky faucet, design more efficient closet space, or replicate their favourite Thai food. Here again, writers are competing with the likes of YouTube, with visual instruction manuals that leave nothing to the imagination.

Perhaps the assumption is that postindustrial readers have already been so infantilized that they can be fooled into thinking a practical article with a clear takeaway is as useful as an instructional YouTube video. Otherwise, we might have expected readers to rebel against this trend towards oversimplified self-help and to say to themselves:

Who are you trying to fool with these pandering articles? Any problem that can be so easily solved with a trio of actionable takeaways must have been solved more conveniently somewhere else in video form. So why would I want to read Video Lite?

The Dread of Complexity: Excuses for Oversimplification

The Mind Cafe editor goes on to specify the style he’s looking for:

we pride ourselves on simplicity and honesty. Our tone is conversational and relaxed.

We believe in good writing, but good writing as something that’s accessible and easy to understand.

We don’t want long, complicated sentences that people have to read several times to fully understand. We believe that readers looking to improve their lives want to access useful information quickly and easily — without having to decipher archaic words that only seven people on the planet can actually define.

So here it’s spelled out: keep it simple, easy to understand, conversational, and relaxed. And the editor provides a link to a more detailed explanation of what he considers engaging content. That linked article has 17.9 thousand claps and 145 comments (at last count), so there can be no doubt that the editor knows what the audience wants to read.

Nevertheless, in arguing against what he calls “overcomplication,” the editor makes a series of astonishing statements in that second article. The editor says, “Whether you write history books, fantasy novels or self-help articles, you’re a storyteller,” in that “in any piece of writing, it’s your job to take readers on a journey through your mind.”

But that’s fallacious. Sure, writing means conveying the thoughts in your mind, but that doesn’t mean there’s no difference between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction writers may put a premium on entertainment, but nonfiction writers may prefer to educate. In any case, the standards of one genre don’t apply to the other just because all written ideas begin as thoughts in the mind.

The reason the editor brings up the mind, though, is that he wants to point out that “your mind’s a complicated place,” so your job as a “storyteller” or at least as a writer is to take the reader through that complicated place, and “the best way to do that is to keep things simple.”

If the editor’s point were just that simplicity is preferable to overcomplication, there would be little to criticize here. But the editor makes it sound as though the only reason a writer would resort to a fancy word is to show off or to overcomplicate matters:

We’re all proud owners of a mental dictionary containing words that only a few people know. And it’s tempting to use the most intellectually-impressive words you have at your disposal when composing a piece of writing…Perhaps they’ll make you sound intelligent and well-read. But will anybody really know what you’re talking about?…See, when you’re writing, your task isn’t to impress readers. At least, not to the point that your fancy words leave them checking the dictionary every thirty seconds…The skilled author is already sure of his abilities. He feels no need to show off to gain respect.

Yes, there are articles that overcomplicate problems, including philosophical ones. Yes, there are writers who just want to show off. But if you consult a dictionary, you’ll find that languages contain many words for a reason. Specifically, even broadly synonymous words will have subtle differences in meaning. To demand that authors keep it simple, while personally attacking writers who do otherwise by treating them as show-offs and obscurantists, is to degrade language and thought, to cater to the lowering of intellectual standards by our addictive, infantilizing media.

At this point the editor has the gall to appeal to George Orwell as though Orwell would have approved of these excuses for how our technology may degrade us. Yes, Orwell said, “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” but that’s different from saying, “Keep it simple.”

What if the subject requires precise conceptual distinctions? What if your choice of words is based on a grasp of their subtle differences in meaning, and your intention is to elevate the discourse in opposition to cultural forces of regression and collective mesmerism? Why should non-minimalist aesthetics in writing be anathema?

And what would be wrong with doing linguistic justice to a real, complicated problem that can be recognized in the first place only by those who revel in cognitive precision? Why should reality be as simple as we’d prefer it to be when we’re tired and want only to be entertained and reassured? Why isn’t oversimplification just as problematic as overcomplication?

Turning the Tide

The Mind Cafe editor is correct to point out that, “The ability to express complicated ideas simply is a sign of a skilled author, as much as we might think the opposite to be true.” Indeed, a reader is well-served if the writer can eliminate confusion by simplifying a complicated problem.

But what the editor is doing here is ignoring the problem of oversimplification. What’s more common these days in freelance writing, articles that overcomplicate or ones that oversimplify?

To the extent that they follow guidelines like this editor’s, publications like Mind Cafe succumb to technological and capitalistic trends that don’t necessarily have happy endings for any of us, the oversimplified self-help fixation on carefree happiness notwithstanding.

The question we’re left with is whether writers should go with the flow or swim against the tide. If you want to succeed and be popular as a writer, while betraying your higher calling, you’ll be a sophist, using rhetoric to manipulate the audience or to provide cover for the technologies and economic systems that excel at doing so. However, if you write with ideals in mind, you’ll go the more philosophical route and write to express your best self’s vision of how the world should be.