When people tell me my column is too confusing, they can’t follow, my connections are too obtuse, echoes too faint, sentences too damned long, well, I think of Don DeLillo and Annie Dillard.Perfect, I think. Winners of the National Book Award (DeLillo) and Pulitzer (Dillard). What great company! I could only hope to write so wildly as them. Move over, Hunter. (S. Thompson, not the one you’re thinking of.)But I don’t blame my critics. They’re right, after all. In this musty corner of the paper, I am wrestling news consumers into something approximating literature. Not that my crap is literature or even literary. Call it high art adjacent, perhaps. A good try. At least bug spray for folks who won’t crack a book.  Most come to the paper or website to catch up on what’s happening, not for clever writing, of course. Even in the commentary section, though it used to be somewhat of a bastion for thinkers and readers, and a safe place for writers to play.Maybe social media ruined all that as news outlets fell into its vortex, sucked along some flawed logic that click bait couldn’t be all bad if everyone was biting, could it?    Nearly all of us have become social media junkies, our ability to concentrate ruined, gone deaf to nuance in storytelling as we fall for the same dreary tales repeated over and over, ironically for their shock value. Cortisol and dopamine, outrage and perfect lives, twin jets sandblasting cognitive function.Worse, we can’t figure out how to keep the poison away from the children. We’re addicts ourselves, basically pushing the stuff. What’s the right age for their own phone and social accounts? Nine, 12, 14? The surgeon general talks about struggling with this question in his own home, knowing better than anyone the very real ills. The grownups are not mature enough to handle it, never mind the little ones. This is our brave new soma.The transformation is nearly complete if this must be explained. We’ve gone so Orwellian we no longer recognize the references. I’ll risk conceit, sink into it with the fervor of someone who used to smoke. This is worse than that.Oh, I still have my accounts, sure enough. I just don’t use them other than as occasionally as possible for work. Which means I remain vulnerable, a young grandson’s photo or powder shot away from tumbling back in, telling myself I can quit any time, scrolling, scrolling.I told an anxious mom outside the men’s room at the movie theater recently that her 7- or 8-year-old son was doing well in there, washing his hands and everything. She was relieved. “I need to stop watching so much news,” she said. “Oh, or maybe social media,” she added with what I took as an epiphany.The worst does happen in real life. Our reptilian brain cores are most attuned to the possibility for the obvious reason, which is what also makes us so vulnerable to things like gossip, social cues, criticism and the awful instinct to hide our true selves. Elements of all media prey on these fears and in the case of best-life posing, that inherent corrosion, too.Still, we do need to know where the tiger was last seen, what the poisonous spider looks like, how Horatio did it.Mass communication, whether by the turned page or a click or scroll or swipe, is how the species evolves anymore. And mass stupidity, egged on by groupthink, has been the accompanying eternal curse on humanity. These are just facts, the boulders in the path. Our barnacles on the good ship progress.We’re helpless alone on this wide sea, we little drops, we tiny boats. The world plows on, heedless, titanic. What are we to do? Well, we each can tend to our own craft, at least that.Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.The post Journalism Matters: Navigating this post-literate life appeared first on Park Record.