Internet. Use of English B1+

Consider Alissa Rubin. She's the New York Times' bureau chief in Paris. Before that she was the bureau chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she reported from the front lines on the postwar reconstruction. Around the time I was writing this chapter, she … a series of hard-hitting articles that looked at the French government's complicity in the Rwandan genocide.

Rubin, in other words, is a serious journalist who is good at her craft. She also, at what I can only assume is the persistent … of her employer, tweets.

Rubin's Twitter profile reveals a steady and somewhat desultory string of missives, one every two to four days, as it Rubin receives a regular notice trom the Times' social media desk (a real thing) ... her to appease her followers.

With few exceptions, the tweets simply mention an article she recently read and … .

Rubin is a reporter, not a media personality. Her value to her paper is her ability to cultivate important sources, pull together facts, and write articles that … .

It's the Alissa Rubins of the world who … the Times with its reputation, and it's this reputation that provides the foundation for the paper's commercial success in an age of ubiquitous and addictive click-bait.

So why is Alissa Rubin urged to regularly interrupt this necessarily deep work to provide, for free, shallow content to a service run by an … media company based out of Silicon Valley?

And perhaps even more important, why does this behavior seem so normal to most people? If we can answer these questions, we'll better understand the final trend I want to discuss relevant to the question of why deep work … so paradoxically rare.

A foundation for our answer … in a warning provided by the late communication theorist and New York University professor Neil Postman.

Writing in the early 1990s, as the personal computer revolution first accelerated, Postman argued that our society was sliding into a … relationship with technology.

We were, he noted, no longer discussing the trade-offs surrounding new technologies, … the new efficiencies against the new problems intro-duced. If it's high-tech, we began to instead assume, then it's good. Case closed.

He called such a culture a technopoly, and he didn't mince words in warning against it. "Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World," he argued in his 1993 book on the topic. "It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and … irrelevant."