A longtime interest of mine has been how media shapes us; from thought, affect, perception, and imagination to behavior, relationships, identity, and ideology. But most interesting of all is how this largely happens unnoticed and so disappears into the unconscious. In the background, it becomes instilled and internalized, enculturated and enacted, structured and institutionalized, rationalized and normalized. It becomes reality as we know it, that is to say ideological realism; as over the decades and generations and centuries, it simply gets built into the entire civilizational project and paradigm. Then we lose all capacity of critical thought in no longer being able to imagine the world as it actually is or as it otherwise might be.
As research shows, media in the broader McLuhanesque sense — as technologies, environments, systems, and infrastructure — even fundamentally alters brain structure and neurocognitive development (Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World). We are physically, psychologically, and socially transmogrified without realizing it, as we reorient in line with the ground moving beneath our feet. It’s as if we landed in Oz while not noticing the house had been lifted into the air. The home we’ve always known still surrounds us, if the landscape is now alien. That’s why older generations complain about the younger, in seeing the differences over time — it’s always easier to see something in another than in oneself. Whereas each new youngest generation just adapts unquestioningly and accepts it, until they too become old. The changes, like an undertow, carry us into terra incognita.
Yet some generations, no matter stage of life, gain greater perspective than others. In particular, last wave GenXers and first wave Millennials grew up on the precipice, during a period of transition and transformation. This peer cohort on the cusp is sometimes referred to as the MTV Generation (adolescents and young adults from the 1980s to mid-1990s), of which I’m a member (b. 1975). We came of age as one media order tipped over into another. So, we have equal understanding of what came before as what replaced it. For that reason, though intimately familiar with both, maybe not fully at home in either.
The older generations are mostly lost in nostalgia of post-war mass media, while the younger generations have never known anything else besides constant personal tech that preoccupies nearly every waking moment. But it’s precisely the contrast between the two media systems, cultures, and worldviews that offers a vantage point, allows some distance to think dispassionately or else at an angle. With less exclusive loyalty to only one mediated social order, we media borderlanders are more likely to take various media technologies as unique tools to be used. In this, we have greater flexibility. Our identities potentially can be less singularly entrenched.
About a year ago, an old friend of mine moved back to town. We were hanging out one day, as she looked through a box of old papers. She came across letters I had written her when she first moved away. One epistolary message was from 1998 when I was still in my early 20s. If with much of the angst and uncertainty lingering from my teens, there also still remained some youthful optimism and excitement about the world (it was pre-9/11, after all). I described getting my first personal computer and my own internet connection (dial-up), about which I sang praises — a shiny new thing!
Of course, earlier in my family’s home and at school, I’d had access to computers since a child. And my initial experiences with the internet were during high school. But it was different to suddenly be immersed in it while living out on my own, to spend hours freely surfing the web and joining online forums. And I recall being conscious of how it changed me, how it was restructuring my mind. I was old enough that my mentality had developed in a slower and gentler media world, between shelves of books and old network television, plus an Atari video game system. Yet the ruts in my brain were not so hardened that I couldn’t take in new impressions, that new media couldn’t lay down new tracks of thought.
It’s similar to learning to speak a second language or code switch when younger. Or it’s like moving to an entirely different place early in life. That also happened to me. When in middle school, my family relocated from a small liberal college town in the Midwest (Iowa City, Iowa) to a metro area with a military fort in the heart of the Deep South (Columbia, South Carolina). It has caused me to be obsessed with the differences in regional cultures ever since. I’m highly sensitized to noticing cultures and how they influence people. Well, the same thing applies to how I pay attention and relate to media cultures.
As I’ve aged, just having turned 50 years old, the sense of changes has been made salient. The young-but-maturing generation in high school, in college, and entering the workforce is Generation Z (AKA Zoomers or Doomers). They are largely the children of GenXers and some older Millennials. Their parents include my brothers, cousins, and friends. So, I’ve personally observed GenZ grow up in this media-saturated world; and, of course, it’s gone from saturated to drowning with Generation Alpha. My oldest GenZ niece got her first job as an elementary school teacher and it’s been shocking for her. Kids these days!
In a couple of years, I’ll be coming to my 30th anniversary of full internet immersion. So, it’s not only that I’ve seen the totalizing change from the old new media to the new new media but also I’ve observed how the internet, cellphones, social media, etc have become something entirely different, as big tech has literally taken over the world in having bought governments and now actively seeks to create techno-feudalism. In the calm and quiet early online world, there was little to no concern about trolls, bots, algorithms, algospeak, censorship, shadow banning, deplatforming, demonetizing, AI, automation, and on and on. Now we worry about brain rot, the surveillance corporate-state, and technological apocalypse.
As a good liberal and critical leftist, I’m not prone to right-wing culture war, moral panic, and nostalgia-mongering. But admittedly, there is more than enough reason to have serious trepidation about the state of society. It’s not that there has never before been tumultuous and destabilizing change, including rapid developments of media technology. Then again, the pace of near constant innovation is now rapid in a way that hasn’t previously occurred. Before we can catch our breath, the next media technology has been introduced, mass marketed, and wholesale adopted. Then the next and the next.
Meanwhile, we peons of the masses have become pawns in the ideologies and agendas, schemes and machinations, visions and fantasies of tech oligarchs and their cronies in the capitalist class and among the political elite. Even at the height of cultural Cold War, no global superpower wielded a propaganda system of mind control as powerful and pervasive as presently manipulated and weaponized by big tech companies that are enmeshed in governments or have outright taken over governments, in their being part of a new techno-fascist inverted totalitarianism operating at a transnational level. The global swamp! [See: shadow network, butterfly revolution, Epstein files, etc.]
The game has changed because mentalities have changed. It’s not only the general public who has been targeted for a new kind of brainwashing, indoctrination, perception management, and social control. The elite themselves have been altered, one might say deranged, in ways they apparently don’t realize. As I’ve argued, the controllers are out of control, which causes them to ever seek more control, yet to simultaneously cause everything to go out of control as they project their internal chaos upon the world. It turns out that apocalyptic accelerationism is not a wise philosophy to rule by.
[For context: “Research shows that, as one ascends the ladder of socioeconomic status, capacity for cognitive empathy tends to decline, related to declining generosity. The fact that both Musk and Trump were born into extreme wealth and power could explain their problems with empathy, specifically their indifference and cruelty toward others, but also their disconnection and derangement. In lacking self-control, they seek to control others. But the more they try to gain control the more everything goes out of control“ (Liberal Empathy, the Weapon of Satan).]
Also, consider that the elite are likewise indoctrinated, as they’re even more deeply embedded in the system. That’s how we end up with elites who are well-educated conformists, the last ones to see it all for what it is (William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite). And about media as a propaganda system, keep in mind that the upper class individuals in positions of authority and influence are the first and most important targets: “The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an ‘official narrative’ that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them” (C.J. Hopkins, Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works).
My present thoughts, however, are on the more immediate level. As an ordinary nobody just trying to get by in life, I wonder how this media system is affecting me, along with those around me and those I interact with. I’ve grown dissatisfied with not just social media but online comment sections entirely, even on the best platforms. I feel constantly on edge and on the defense. The quality of online dialogue has declined over the decades and is now plummeting into a state of total shitfuckery, possibly having to do with the dead internet theory. There is now more AI content than human content on the internet. And in many countries, most internet traffic is monopolized by bots.
But it’s worse than that. As we humanoids interact with bots, AI, and all they produce, we internalize it, model it, and become like it. It’s not only AI that is training on us. We’re training on it and so feeding back to it, in a vicious loop that will over time become our shared culture and social norms. We mere humans, specifically us commoners, are certainly not in control. And then worse than worse, we carry this online culture back out into the real world. We humans will increasingly become like bots and AI. Even offline, the algorithm imprinted on our brains will continue to operate. We’ll lose the capacity to think, speak, and act as free-range beings.
On a more mundane level, it’s simply the way it constrains us. We forget how to interact normally; or, in the case of some, never having learned it in the first place. Cloistered in personal space, it’s near taboo to just call someone up or knock on their door unexpected, the kind of thing that was normal human behavior for most of human existence. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari described sitting in a coffee shop. While pretending to read a book, he eavesdropped on two guys talking. Apparently, they were online ‘friends’ who were meeting offline for the first time. They talked to each other as if each on their own separate social feeds. One would give a soliloquy about his life. Then the other would do the same.
It was as if neither was listening nor responding to the other. They didn’t know how to have an ordinary conversation as mutual dialogue, instead each residing within their own private bubble. Hence, they existed in parallel with no actual meeting point of engagement or likely any social awareness, much less cognitive empathy. One senses this kind of thing is becoming common. That is to say narcissism may be taking over as the standard operating mode. That wouldn’t only be individual narcissism but also group narcissism. Our identities are becoming insular and exclusionary, similar to our media environments becoming epistemically enclosed echo chambers and reality tunnels.
There is a related issue. It’s also how we’re getting trapped in ideological identities, though not in terms of ideology in the normal sense. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but it feels like it’s increasing. On the early internet, ideological identities used to be less relevant and prominent. Most people mostly related as individuals. Groupthink, however, seems to be taking over. As this happens, ideological labels become ever less connected to coherent ideologies, rather being expressions of warped identities, posturing, and aesthetics; something like ideological LARPing. I keep coming across self-styled ‘libertarians’, ‘anarchists’, and ‘communists’ who are various forms of crypto-authoritarians, crypto-dominators, and crypto-reactionaries; from Putin tankies as red fascists or state capitalists to ancaps (i.e., anarcho-capitalists) as social Darwinists or aspiring corporate oligarchs.
That is not exactly a new phenomenon. What’s changed is that it’s become more prevalent and widespread, to the point of dominating entire online groups. Real ideological discussion is often near impossible, as few have meaningful ideological knowledge. Image has replaced substance. This co-opting and recuperating of ideology is a pattern among reactionaries that probably has always been around, but in the past it was limited to a small minority of bad actors and those on the fringe. It’s what Corey Robin describes as the behavior of the reactionary mind, which I’d link to the dark triad traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (+sadism).
To get back to the main topic, we can understand this with the research and scholarship of media studies. The literary mind increases the level of abstract thought, which has both benefits and downsides. But under present suboptimal conditions as literacy is replaced and displaced by or else filtered through post-literate media of image and voice, these abstractions are not only reified through social structures but, more problematically, amplified through agonism (Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality) and tribalism (Marshall McLuhan’s global village), along with passivity (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death) and distraction (Johann Hari, Stolen Focus). Through anxiety and fear, stress and sickliness, alienation and dislocation, it’s exacerbated further into extremism.
For a specific example, one I often repeat is from cultivation theory. When people are repeatedly exposed to media portrayals of violence and crime (Fox News, crime procedurals, etc), there is a corresponding increase of mean world syndrome: distrust, paranoia, exaggerated threat perception, authoritarianism, xenophobia, and punitiveness (e.g., liberals who learned of the 9/11 terrorist attack from tv reporting with endlessly looping footage of the event were later more supportive of right-wing policies, such as Homeland Security and the Iraq War.) People internalize dark narratives, project them outward onto others, and then attack those others as the threat they themselves have become. In fear, they create a world of fear and really do make the world a more harsh, cruel, and dangerous place. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I’ve long contemplated and posted about the pitfalls of mediated reality (Battle of Voices of Authorization in the World and in Ourselves; & The Great Weirding of New Media), playing no small part in the mass derangement that overtaken us across my lifetime (The Great WEIRDing of the Jaynesian Ego-Mind as a Civilizational Project), if far from limited to only media problems (A Theory of Societal Retardation). People are getting ever more strange, year after year. All of the above is what I think about in trying to decide how to deal with our present media world and mediated reality. My mood is that of caution and so I offer my observations as a warning but also as an explanation. First and foremost, we need to see clearly what’s happening around us and to us.
With the new year having begun a short while back, I was contemplating my own media diet, in wanting to find the best balance between my mental health and gaining an audience for my writings (A New Year, a New Era). But in observing the harms incurred, I’ve ever more been erring on the side of protecting my own sanity in a society that sometimes feels downright psychotic. For the collective level, the public needs far better media literacy and intellectual self-defense. There is nothing wrong with media changes, if we understand our situation. Yes, some things we’re attached to or take for granted are weakened, compromised, or entirely lost. But there is also much that might be gained. It’s the old scenario of opportunity being the other side of risk, if admittedly the risks are great. Media is a powerful force. Like it or not, a new age is upon us.
Marmalade 