By way of updating Benjamin Disraeli’s slam that there are three kinds of lies—“lies, damned lies, and big data,” I can’t help but share this screen grab from Google Trends. For those who’ve never toyed with this mental crack-equivalent before, it’s a way to analyze and compare the volume of Google searches on a topic, over a period of time, in a geography of interest. Here, I entered “Will Smith slap,” as the first search term (blue line), “Ukraine” as the second (red line), “Joe Biden” as the third (yellow line), last 7 days as the period, and USA-USA-USA! as the playground.

Now before you follow me in jumping to all the obvious conclusions —dammit, Jim, the Reductionist is a creative fool, not a data scientist—some caveats. As in Google not revealing the actual volume of the searches reported, so we don’t know whether the Smith spike reflects millions of ‘mericans acting with one thumb, or a paltry few thousands captivated by the kerslapple. Similarly, the results depend on the terms you choose—so we can’t be certain if some percentage of the Ukraine line reflects non-war topics. 

Dubious, I’d think, but human nature has a habit of zigging from the predicted zags.

And that is exactly what fascinates about the comparison. First, because the decay in attention for the Smith-Rock contretemps flies in the face of the widely accepted addictive influence of Kardashian culture. Second, because Biden’s “moral statement about Putin” (my vote) and/or heinous gaffe (Tucker Carlson’s vote) didn’t get all that much traction, relative to the presidential norm.

And, last, contradicting endless imprecations about our national goldfish-scale attention span, Ukraine has been holding its relative own, despite so many competitive distractions. Are US people really so concentrated on our own narrow interests that we completely disengage with the world? Maybe not as much as the conventional wisdom—ad industry, sadly included—would have you believe.

Not to paraphrase ad legend Howard Gossage, but I’m going to anyhow: “people pay attention to what interests them, and sometimes it happens to be a vile and disgusting abrogation of human moral standards. Even if another episode of “Celebrity Pantsing” beckons.

And then, there’s what Russell Brand, the speed-rapping British comedian-cum-movie-star-cum-Covid-asshole, points out in his latest YouTube video: there’s reality and then there’s alternative reality which, at times can seem more real than reality. In that world, “attention” is what we pretend it is, Will Smith’s lapse sustained viewership into the usually deadly Academy hours, tickets to Chris Rock’s shows have rocked to $1K/per, and, doubtless, the Oscars will see a major ratings bump next year for the same reason people slow down to gawk a freeway fatality.

In that despicable view, the dark side of human nature is money, and a slap becomes a commercially viable way to get attention success. Which is why my colleagues and I chose to register this dissent earlier this week:

Then again, maybe in a Kardashian culture world, we’re the ones missing the Google trending point.