Opinion: Sherrod, Vilsack and the Dangers of Our Clip Culture

(July 22) -- The Shirley Sherrod saga is political theater at the most profound level. It's got layers: nuclear partisanship, racial freight, rich personal narratives -- making it part Greek tragedy, part Southern Gothic. Like Faulkner said, in the South the past isn't history -- it isn't even past.

But these red meat, carnivorous delights have distracted much of the commentary from what seems to me to be the deepest moral lesson here, and that's the dangers of full speed ahead. Because what started this cascade of consequences was a very simple mistake: Tom Vilsack made a snap decision that was dead wrong. He allowed a brutally edited version of Sherrod's remarks, constructed for political reasons, to act as a decapitated proxy for the whole deal.

In short, Vilsack allowed himself to become a victim of our cut-and-paste, wrenched-out-of-context, instant judgment, text-happy, BlackBerry-propelled clip culture.

Like most of us, he has become accustomed to making quick judgments on partial evidence. (Ironic for an agriculture secretary, the cabinet position that oversees the most patient industry in the country.) How often do all of us read part of an e-mail -- or listen to a portion of a voice mail -- and race dangerously off in the wrong direction? How many of us have had our own mini Vilsack moments? I know I have.

Our culture has become dependent upon this highlight-reel approach to decision making. CEOs and senior management never get the full picture -- they live in the land of "executive summaries" where a few PowerPoint bullet points, designed by managers who want to shape opinion, give them the same selectively edited worldview.

Even worse, we are encouraged to trust our instincts. Books like Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" celebrate the ancient wiring of our brains, arguing that our ability to make instant and wise judgments is part of our evolutionary provenance.

But we live in a world where technology can trick us and trip us. Video-editing techniques, Photoshop and other forms of digital manipulation are capable of instantly changing perceived reality and hence deceiving our hard-wired gifts. One can easily sound like a cultural studies professor and wonder if we have de-materialized and mediated existence to the point where we are reacting to ever-escalating derivatives of "real life." Walter Benjamin's "mechanical means of reproduction" on steroids.

Perhaps there will be some upside to this, and I don't mean another photo-oppy suds summit. Perhaps Vilsack's snap decision, so painfully wrong, will serve as a national touchstone for the risks of racing through life without considering the fullness of context. And for not thinking long and hard about the motivations of those who shape and sandpaper "content" for our consumption.

If we replace Blink with Think, life will take a little longer, but we'll all be a lot better off for it. Just ask Tom.

Adam Hanft, founder and CEO of Hanft Projects, is a nationally known authority on consumer marketing, business strategy and social trends. He has written for The Huffington Post, Politics Daily, The Daily Beast, Fast Company and the Barnes & Noble Review.