I can often be founding complaining in this blog about the speed of modern life. The constant assault of news, media, texts, emails, and even entertainment turns us into distracted, annoyed and un-focused creatures.

I’d like to further argue that the speed of modern information does more than just upset our personal equilibrium. It upsets the zeitgeist—the shared context the pervades the cultural moment.

Zeitgeist is a deliberately vague word (despite being German) but we all have some familiarity with it. It’s whatever makes the culture of now feel like the culture of now. It’s the hit songs on the radio, it’s the shows on Netflix (not so much TV) that people are talking about, it’s the news stories that fill the air, and on and on.

I think in the past, we had a bit more time to acclimate to the zeitgeist. Trends would rise and they would sit there in the air a bit before wafting away. To use an example, hair metal, the genre of heavy metal popular in the 1980s, lasted a good 2-3 years* before being usurped by grunge, which itself lasted even longer. I don’t think that’s the case now. Musical genres seem to rise and fall rather quickly.

* If one wants to gets picky about it, one could really identify two periods of hair metal in the 80s. There was the early 80s period that brought about groups like Motley Crue and Quiet Riot, and the later period kicked off by Guns-n-Roses which led to a mass signing of hair metal bands to record labels.

Another example: I was just listening to some podcast where an interviewee was bemoaning the loss of power experienced by magazines like The New Yorker and the Atlantic. These magazines are still around, of course, but the guy was complaining that they no longer “drove the conversation.” These magazines no longer define the zeitgeist in the way they used to.

There’s also a political and intellectual zeitgeist happening at any moment. (Clearly the political zeitgeist just had a massive change with the election of Donald Trump.) This zeitgeist is defined by the topics and policies under discussion, the books being read, the blog posts making the rounds, the ideas about politics, policies and ethics defining the spirit of the times. And I think that zeitgeist too is moving much quicker.

How do I know? Well, Trump is a good example. The media—the guys who should control the zeitgeist or at least have some insight into it—got him wrong at the beginning and then continued to get him wrong. At the start, they, like me, thought he was a joke. Then they predicted his political implosion five thousand times. Then they predicted, armed with lousy polls, that he would lose the election. And yet here we are.

The media aren’t controlling the zeitgeist. They’re playing catch-up with it.

I’ll give an example of my personal failure to feel the zeitgeist. When Bernie Sanders ran for the Democratic nomination, I figured he’d last about two days. The “socialist” moniker was going to kill him, I thought. Instead, he had a long run and a case can be made that he would have defeated Trump had he been given the spot. What did I get wrong?

I think it’s that the term “socialist” just doesn’t carry the negative connotation anymore. I grew up in the 80s during the chill of the cold war when “socialist” wasn’t that far from “communist,” and the communists were the guys with a billion nukes pointed at us. We feared them. But someone who is in their twenties today (and many of Sanders supporters were young) would have never experienced that fear, at least not directly. For them, the power of these terms has changed, and thus so has the zeitgeist.