• by Jack Feuer , February 27, 2008

I couldn't get to sleep Sunday night, so I took an Oscar telecast and was out before my head hit the pillow. And as I surrendered consciousness to Morpheus, my last thought was that we live in a culture whose intellect is so technologically disabled that its donkey-dumb citizens probably don't know who Morpheus is. At best, they'd probably mistake the Greek god of dreams for the P2P file-sharing program that jacked his name. If not that, then Laurence Fishburne's character in "The Matrix."

The dirty little secret of why digitization is such a challenge for business communicators is not channel proliferation, ad avoidance, inability to pay attention or the rise of interactivity. It's the sheer stupidity of the target demo. Any target demo.

Technology turns your mind to mush. All that watching and no comprehending. All those images and no context. The only ability required is putting your finger to a keyboard.

You know those cell phone ads where the mom gets frustrated because her daughter and even the mom's mom refuse to talk in anything but textspeak? That's your brain on technology.

Digital devices think for us. We say it's liberating, but it's really enslaving. This is not a new idea. But it's terrifying to watch it play out in our lives. And it's hell on marketing plans based on the assumption that the people being marketed to do not have the intelligence quotient of a canary.

"I sob for the future," wrote blogger wizardguy this week, in response to Salon.com's King Kaufman doing a video in lieu of his usual written online sports column. I share his pain, and you should, too.

Don't fail to feel me here, people. I'm an aging grouch, but I'm not a Luddite. I don't pine for the days when the apex of high technology was a printing press. I'm grateful that I live in a time where computers, email and cell phones are commonplace. I'll be ecstatic if I survive long enough to live in a society where I can clone a starlet, learn Mandarin through a nano virus, vacation on Mars and live with a robot that cleans the cat's litterbox, fetches me beer and calls me "Daddy."

But the cost of all that glittery future-tech will be that I become a blithering dipstick.

This is why--as I've written repeatedly but no one listens--user-generated content should never be encouraged, let alone enabled, by media and advertising stalwarts. What it ought to be is shot in its concrete head, but it's clearly too late for that.

So I say the Vast American Messaging Machine should face reality. No more platitudes about how wonderful it is that your customers are in control of your entire marketing budget. It's not wonderful; it's a nightmare. And you know it.

It doesn't matter if your target is an 18-year-old gamer, a soccer mom, a fantasy baseball nut or a white-collar professional with questions about his portfolio. You're talking to idiots. Ideate and activate accordingly.

And then you'll sleep like a baby, even without a montage to binoculars in film.