Another sign of the times: older books getting a resurgence in sales from fans posting emotional reactions on TikTok.
Hmm. It seems that one can quickly change minds (and behavior!) on a population scale with super-short emotional appeal.
The good: Shows that Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an important pillar of modern online technology: emotions and story change more minds than just data. (link is to a blog post on The Undoing Project about Kahneman’s life and work).
The bad: Shows that Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains” is also right — we don’t have patience to read long-form fiction, except maybe when TikTok tells us to. (link to my mindfulness blog series, and a review of Carr’s book).
How ironic.
