The Psychic and Social Effects of Media

Socrates and Plato, the earliest philosophers known to most Westerners, both highly esteemed "the soul's conversation with itself" and leaned heavily toward the use of dialogic conversation as the second-best media type, because it mimicked the internal conversations which we have with ourselves. Even in Plato's use of writing, he follows the form of spoken dialogues, and he employs Socrates as his protagonist.

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Written language was just coming into vogue in their time, and they warned against its use. In Plato's Phaedrus, he has Socrates say (as Socrates might have actually said to someone) to the inventor of written language:

"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

"What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows."

Socrates' and Plato's main concern was not that people in a written-word-based culture would suffer from memory atrophy, so much as they would be injured by a lack of true, in-depth understanding such as could come through dialogue, and further harmed by their mistaken belief that they had achieved understanding when they had not.

In the 20^th century, media theorists such as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman thought and wrote deeply about the effects on culture, history and the inner lives of human beings, of the various media forms that in successive waves constrained and re-routed Earth civilization since that early beginning. The spoken word and art were the first media revolutions, followed by the written word, the printing press, photography, cinema, radio, television, the Internet and virtual reality.

In the 1970s I wrote my own views in a treatise called Three Historic Shocks and the Modern Trance, in which I painted tools, weapons and media as the three turning-point invention types, with written language media being the most pivotal of these, because it accelerated invention in general, leading to massive information overload beyond our capability to assimilate as understanding beings, the condition which exists today that I call Acceleritis.

Neil Postman had studied McLuhan, who had studied Innis -- as Aristotle had studied Plato, who had studied Socrates. Of course, I had been influenced by McLuhan, but only recently have taken up reading Postman. Interestingly, Jack Myers had been an actual student of Postman's, and they collaborated on projects when Jack ran research at CBS, which led to Jack's self-identification as a media ecologist.

Another media ecologist at MediaVillage, Stacey Lynn Schulman, was another collaborator of Postman's, having traveled to Prague together right after the fall of communism there.

Of the three in the lineage leading to Postman, it is Postman who thoroughly ties up and illuminates the loose ends of the novel observations made by Innis and McLuhan, in his must-read classic Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

Postman was concerned about the fate of humanity, and saw the threat vectors through two alternative lenses, those of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984). In Orwell's view of the looming dangerous future, the strong would take over the lives of the weak to a degree of totalitarian control that could never have been achieved without television and mass surveillance -- Big Brother Is Watching You. In Huxley's vision of dystopia, it's the opposite -- We Are Watching Big Brother, it's merely an amusing pastime, and our lives consist of nothing but a series of trivial self-amusements. Postman felt that the evidence as of 1985 pointed more strongly in the direction of Huxley's world being the one that we are being sucked into like a black hole.

The reason he pointed out was the nature of television itself. Not only does television dictate the form of the content (as every medium does) it also conditions the substance conveyed. Television by its nature focuses mostly on images, and because the human mind seeks constant novelty (new patterns never seen before) and therefore quickly tires of sameness, TV causes a need for speed to maintain the audience's presence. These forces result in most of the content on television (including streaming and all devices) moving quickly from one thing to another with emphasis on the attraction of the images more than the audio track. Postman compellingly connects the dots to the superficial, ultrashort attention span culture we have become.

Postman's issue was not with the superficiality of television, but with the superficiality of all of us, imposed by the entire culture being built around television. Politics and religion becoming more like television. Without the ability to follow a logical thread across many steps, such as the Age of Print supported, today the minds of too many of us autonomously flit from this to that. A conspiracy theorist would claim that some bad people had conjured in advance to install ADD/ADHD across civilization. Postman attributes these undesirable and perhaps disastrous mental habits to the endless discontinuities on television. As he writes regarding one specific example:

"We have become so accustomed to (television news') discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, 'Now … this.' One can hardly overestimate the damage that such juxtapositions do to our sense of the world as a serious place. The damage is especially massive to youthful viewers who depend so much on television for their clues as to how to respond to the world."

In our own words, the mélange of short bits of content mixing the ridiculous with the sublime in one congealed stream appears to train the subconscious that everything is equally unimportant. What is lost by such a culture is a respect for the seriousness and divinity of life.

McLuhan had explained that television sucks us into being part of a groupmind going on at that time, leading to a suppression of individual identity, and that loss of sense of identity is a principal cause of violence.

The hypnotic herd effect of television as seen from 1985 was yet to see the outcome of the development of interactivity. These media thought leaders were well aware of the interactivity tests going on between 1976 and 2000. Some of them read my newsletter which had been guiding some of that development. When interactivity came, it had some of the good things I presaged, and unfortunately some not so good things I had not expected. The good thing is that it is a turn back toward individuality and identity brought by interactivity. That was what drove me those years, knowing that return to individualism at least would be one guaranteed outcome. The interactive media give people back their sense of independent identity, a form of self-expression and of friendship. In time we can steer it to be even better than it is right now. Channel those creative energies.

The mass medium once called television but now revealed to be just one facet of screen media, a broader framework that has already taken over, jumped onto mobile phones, mixed scribal culture with video culture, and added more distractive forms of advertising into the bargain.

Screen media when I first got into the business captured four hours per day of the average U.S. adult's time, but today that number has approximately tripled to include virtually every waking moment. It strikes me that if Neil were still with us today, he would be saying he told us so, and explaining how the re-entry of print through screens is not what he wanted -- that he wanted us to be able to read one thing deeply and with sustained continuity leading to true understanding, which is a declining faculty.

Neil admits at the end of his magnum opus that education in the schools is the only hope and that he himself does not give it much hope of happening. I agree with Neil, Huxley and H.G. Wells that we are in a race between education and self-destruction. However, I see that education happening not only through the schools but through all other media as well -- including the very media which are driving the problem. The question is, what sort of education?

Neil alludes to teaching of critical thinking, the ability to detach from the compulsions of the mind-bending media stimuli. To which I would add teaching meta-cognition, the ability to study one's own mind from the inside, including the ability to focus on what had been subconscious and preconscious. This ancient knowledge of the introspective method is what is sorely needed to bring us out of the two ditches Huxley and Orwell signposted, and to empower individuals to manifest their positive creativity.

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