“I paid for a few Gigabytes of mobile network bandwidth and found half of it was missing/stolen the next day!” lamented my friend who was vacationing in an Asian country. According to him, leakage and theft of internet bandwidth or mobile data packages are common in some countries, which deprives people from free and unfettered access to online information. As a result, people have to be judicious how they utilize the limited data and bandwidth they can afford and what type of information they exchange.
Reflecting on our situation in the U.S., I realized while we don’t have theft of bandwidth and mobile data, we have stealing of our attention bandwidth, to an extent which dwarfs the leakage of data bandwidths in other countries. Many of us give away, for free, most of our daily “attention bandwidth” to corporate-sponsored news, commercials, provocative influencers, entertaining films, series and social media posts which have mastered the art if attention-getting. The younger among us give away their attention bandwidth to TikTok and all kinds of games and Apps. Many of us know a lot more about TV series, movie characters and famous folks than about how our body, mind and universe works? We ignore all such matters or trust corporate-sponsored news media to guide and educate us for free!
Sometimes I wish, like in other countries, we also had a limited data bandwidth so we would also cherish our valuable attention span and use our time and attention online more judiciously. My wish is self-serving because in that type of world, the likes of me could compete in content followers with the likes of Howard Stern whose claim to fame included showcasing and pairing midgets and dwarfs (some pictured above) with strippers, and having them engage in sexual acts or farting into each other’s faces, or having people fart along to holy Christmas songs1.
Stern built his media empire thanks to his vulgar narcissistic style, dehumanizing and picking on the society’s underdogs. He is nowadays trying to get some new attention by mocking and picking on the new underdogs: “The unvaccinated” Americans.
I am not trying to blame Stern’s fans. His shows appealed to people rebelling against rigid and hypocritical orthodoxies. I am not blaming Stern either. I wish him peace, health and recovery from neurosis. He has admitted he has been suffering from several psychotic disorders2. I just wonder what does his success reveal about us, our attention bandwidth that is. We live in a world that many people complain they don’t have time to spend quality time with their friends and family, or to read books and educational blogs (like Simple Science: Connect the Dots) about how their body, brain and universe work!
He even filed a trademark for a character named Fartman and almost made that into a movie, titled The Adventures of Fartman, which was reportedly budgeted at $8-$11 million! I don’t think any independent science education podcast or blog (not sponsored by large corporations) has ever made such amounts of money.
Rolling Stone, March 2011. Stern calls himself a Poster Boy for psychotherapy:
"It’s a neurotic thing. When I don’t wear dark glasses, you can see my eyes go back and forth a mile a minute!"