Fleeting Attention

Macario Schettino had an interesting column last Friday about the tendency of Mexicans to discuss important topics with extreme intensity and extreme brevity.

Something's happens. Nothing lasts. I'm not getting philosophical and meditative, I'm referring to the topics of published opinion, I don't know if it's public. There's no topic that resists a few days of discussion and commentary, and then fades away just as quickly. Phone conversations illegally recorded and played in the media rapidly disappear, as do arguments against the arrested Frenchwoman, sensible discussions about the failed state, opinions about the Mexican retaliatory tariffs against the United States. All of the topics become diluted, fleeting, in a sequence that doesn't appear to make any sense.

Maybe some of these topics don't deserve any more time than they receive, maybe they do. It's possible that they are subsumed by the grand national worries, those permanent ones, but I have no idea which they are, if they do in fact exist. There is no doubt that there are a pair of issues that occupy the mind of many Mexicans, the economic crisis and insecurity, but even with these issues the details escape up with the greatest of ease. A few weeks ago, Tijuana was the center of national insecurity; a few days ago, Ciudad Juárez. None of the two occupy the media's attention. And if it's because of those topics, they're better off that way.

The same thing occurs with the economy, in which a couple of months ago it was said that Mexican migrants would tumultuously return, and a few weeks ago that remittances were practically sinking. Then we worried about the value of the peso against the dollar, which a few days ago nobody remembers anymore.

But all these topics live for a few days, although in this ephemeral existence they achieve great intensity. Maybe because we discuss for such a short time, we do so as though our lives depended on it.

Today's kickoff of the debate about the death penalty in the Chamber of Deputies is a good example of this phenomenon. This was a huge story in December, when Humberto Moreira forced a bill legalizing capital punishment through the Coahuila legislature. Three months later, the issue hasn't been settled, the pros and cons haven't changed, and the national legislature is actually considering a change (Moreira's move was essentially symbolic), and there's barely a peep in the media. The way the outrage over Fernando Martí's murder unfolded is another example. The commitment to revitalize Mexico's security apparatus was great, but that was a job that required years of public vigilance, not a 100-day countdown. Now that the countdown has come and gone, where is the anger, where is the attention? I still see Alejandro Martí in the media hitting the same notes, but where are the millions who were behind him last year?

This isn't an exclusively Mexican phenomenon, but a more general consequence of the way narratives are formed in the age of blogs, Google, and Twitter. From frustration over the Democrats' lack of ideas a couple years ago, to the present despair over the "failure" of the Mexican state, popular narratives emerge from like waves from the ocean, splash on the beach, and then disappear, usually leaving everything essentially as it was before.

As Nicholas Carr argued in The Atlantic last summer, the way we learn today has granted the average person a vastly wider range of interests and tools with which to indulge them, but at the price of his or her capacity concentrate and understand a problem at great depth. Carr was referring to the way individual brains function, but it's only logical that the effect would be repeated on a grand scale in our public debates. To prove this, I could remind us of some issue that sustained a detailed public interest for months during the late 1980s or early 1990s, but my blog-riddled, Google-twisted mind can't recall anything from before 2007.