For those of us of a certain age, you might remember The Gong Show and its delightfully chaotic host, Chuck Barris.
For the unfamiliar, it was a 1970s "talent" show judged by a panel of B-list celebrities. Contestants performed all sorts of acts: singing, dancing, ventriloquism, plate-spinning, you name it. If an act was too painful to endure, a judge would slam a giant gong, mercifully ending the spectacle.
The lineup was a wild mix. Some acts had genuine talent. Others were clearly in over their heads. And a few made you wonder which village was missing its idiot.
Sound familiar?
Scroll your feed today and you'll encounter a similar parade:
A LinkedIn guru juggling personal branding and hustle culture in a single breathless post.
A productivity influencer tap dancing through a 3-step method promising you'll "AI your way to $300K."
A viral thread offering job search secrets that collapses under a heap of buzzwords and emojis.
Some content is genuinely helpful. Some content is well-meaning but misguided. And some content deserves an immediate digital gong.
The real issue? There's no Chuck Barris to end the madness. No gong to rescue your attention span. Just an endless scroll of noise masquerading as wisdom.
So, what's your strategy? How do you separate the insightful from the idiotic in today's Digital Gong Show?
Before we can build that strategy, it helps to step back and examine what communication actually is. At its root, it is the transmission of ideas. However, no definition includes the concept of intention in communication.
Intent matters.
Even well-intentioned authors may not recognize their own bias. Most people do their best to communicate objectively, and for straightforward messages like "dinner is ready," is a no-brainer. But even seemingly simple communications can carry hidden weight.
For example, an editor could write these two headlines:
"2 Cats were saved in a house fire"
"A home was destroyed in a fiery inferno"
Both are factual. The event was the same. Yet your response was different for each headline. Now let's move from the hypothetical to actual headlines that have appeared on your newsfeed.
"Tech layoffs July 2025: Microsoft, ByteDance, Intel, Indeed, Scale AI, Lenovo cut jobs this summer"
"AI could create these new jobs despite gloomy forecasts experts say"
No doubt your response was different for each here as well. This isn't just about headlines. It's about every piece of information competing for your attention.
We've already talked about how communication should be looked at through the lens of intention. But here's where most media literacy discussions miss the mark.
They ignore the receiver's role entirely.
Intention matters here too. As a receiver, you are filtering, assessing, analyzing through the lens of what matters to you. Some of that triage takes place without you even being aware. And some you are an active participant.
It is easy to skim a headline that happens to agree with your worldview. You just nod, smile, take another sip of your Red Bull, and move on perhaps even without realizing you did so. Or perhaps you read the headline about that couple at the Coldplay concert, you stop and snicker, and feel just a little bit better about yourself.
We know the product of communication is information. And here's the key insight most people miss: all of us unconsciously assign narrative weight to every post, headline, and comment to determine what we consume.
Senders know they need to fight for the gift of your attention. So headlines become more provocative. Thumbnails more dramatic. Claims more outrageous. The old newsroom adage comes to mind: 'if it bleeds, it leads.' But now, everything has to bleed just to be seen.
And the competition for that attention is fierce. Consider this:
We check our mobile devices about 159 times every day. That's once every six minutes during waking hours. Each check is a micro-decision about what deserves your mental energy.
We spend 42% of our day on screens. That is nearly half of our conscious lives consuming information.
The average person spends 6 hours and 40 minutes daily on screens, which is more time than most people sleep.
Most of the time, you're consuming this flood on autopilot.
But what if you could be more intentional about it?
Enter the FEEL-KNOW-DO Protocol
Instead of passively absorbing whatever emotional triggers, claims, and calls-to-action are embedded in content, you can consciously analyze and decide how to respond. Here's how:
FEEL: What emotion is this trying to trigger? Fear? Hope? Anger? Excitement? Recognizing the emotional hook helps you understand the sender's intent and your own reaction.
KNOW: What claims or assumptions is this making? What facts are presented? What's missing? This is where you separate actual information from opinion, speculation, or manipulation.
DO: What action does this want me to take? Click? Share? Buy? Worry? Feel superior? Understanding the desired outcome helps you decide if it aligns with your goals.
Think of it as your personal gong. Instead of Chuck Barris deciding what deserves to continue, you become the judge of what deserves your attention and mental energy.
Living Laboratory: The Matrix Moment
This is just like a Deadpool Fourth Wall break. I am so excited, as I rarely write in the first person.
Lately I have been experimenting with artifacts in Claude. I am getting ready to give a presentation to a group of HR folks and as part of my prep, I wanted to make some digital tools to help illustrate the theme of my presentation. And that opened the floodgates where I nerded out. My office is a warzone of Red Bull cans, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups wrappers, and empty bags of Fritos (if anyone knows a cat-safe ant deterrent please DM me.) while I played, experimented, and got lost in the tech.
Anyho, in writing this piece, I experimented with several iterations, and after some great feedback from my network, I ultimately landed on these two interactive demonstrations.
Because so much of what I write has pop culture references, I built these two tools with that scene where Morpheus is talking with Neo in mind. However in watching the scene on Youtube again, it's a little dark. And of course the purists, will no doubt DM and say, but Wayne, the blue pill returns Neo back to the "real world." So let me be the first to say, I know.
Think of them as your red pill and blue pill moment (kinda) from The Matrix.
By the end of both demonstrations, you'll see how the same underlying reality - AI's impact on employment - can be framed to create completely different responses. More importantly, you'll have practiced using FEEL-KNOW-DO to decode the messaging.