Ultra-Processed Communication
"How we stopped communicating in context and started communicating in code."
What if the telephone was invented after email and texting? Everyone would exclaim, "Wow, a technology that lets us actually talk to one another!"
It's a satirical line I heard years ago, back when email first seeped, and then gushed, into work life—and then into all of life. Communication multiplied into a torrent of endless interruptions, while understanding and patience were swept away. Be honest: how often do you read an email all the way through, even the bottom? For most of us, there's too many and too much—we skim. Texting took the problem somewhere new and less personal, often leaving us to interpret meaning from an emoji or two.
Now let's flip the line.
What if long-form writing—essays, books, and the like—were invented after the meme? People would rejoice. "This is amazing. Look at all the detail. Look at the depth." They'd marvel that a single piece of writing could hold a complete thought, follow it through, qualify it, complicate it, and arrive somewhere the reader hadn't expected. And in the process, change their understanding. Change them.
Memes, reels, and the rest are snippets and soundbites. Expressions of opinion without substance. They entertain and validate, but that's all they are: capsules of belief and judgment packaged for effortless consumption. They fill our minds with the informational equivalent of ultra-processed food, absent of both context and perspective. We are inundated and satiated, but not informed. We feel full, and mistake the feeling for knowing.
Increasingly, we're emotionally triggered without facts or grounding, drawing conclusions and making decisions—sometimes consequential ones—based on the first line of an email, a short text, or a single emoji.
I once heard that in the absence of information, people make shit up.
Blunt, but true. And we all do it.
It's obvious, yet invisible. Memes, one-liners, and emojis don't inform—they confirm. They open a spigot of thought that fills the gaps in meaning and understanding with our opinions and beliefs, whether they're fact or fiction, real or illusion.
None of this is a surprise. As I point out in a recent post Don't Keep Up. Keep Out, information consumes attention. The more information available, the less attention there is to go around. And we now carry access to infinite information—and its endless disruptions—in our pockets, so our attention spans are a fraction of what they once were.
We've stopped communicating in context that conveys understanding. Now we communicate in code that merely implies it.
The problem isn't just what we consume. It's what we express.
These memes, snippets, and reels don't just reinforce what we believe. More and more, they're how we broadcast it—and even who we are. What we consume shapes us. What we express shapes those around us. If you doubt that this is how we now express ourselves, consider how often someone, maybe even you, shares a thoughtful, informed perspective or concern only to receive a meme in rebuttal. When I see this, I always wonder: did the person lack the time or attention to respond thoughtfully? Or is it something else—conviction without the scaffolding of deeper understanding? Certainly, it's sometimes the former. Increasingly, it's the latter.
And this isn't confined to social media banter.
Increasingly, it's how consequential debate is conducted—national policy announced in a single post, diplomacy carried out in fragments, decisions of real weight reduced to a slogan and an emoji. The medium that flattened our banter is now flattening our debate—and the understanding that only detail can carry.
It's easy to shrug all of this off—well, that's just life today. But the consequences are real. Not just because we risk living a life of illusion we mistake for meaning, but because conflict—including war—is more often than not the result of misunderstanding. And misunderstanding is what happens when code replaces context. When a meme carries a worldview. When a reaction announces who we are.
So imagine for a moment that long-form communication—the kind that requires attention and thoughtful consideration, the slow, patient, sometimes uncomfortable kind, where you actually listen long enough to be changed by what someone else says—was new. What if it were invented now, after years of memes and reels and three-second takes? People would call it revolutionary. As if a light had finally illuminated depths of understanding previously unrealized. They'd say it was the only honest way to understand another person. They'd marvel that anything so simple could feel so rare. The joke, of course, is on us. It already exists. We've just stopped using it.
The Seeker’s Mindset begins with the understanding that wisdom is rarely found in speed, certainty, or noise—but in attention, reflection, curiosity, and the courage to remain open to change.
