The growing influence of the digital screen and new media technologies has ignited angry diatribes and dire warnings everywhere.
Blasts from the Past: Limit TV, Beware of Books, and Get Rid of the Alphabet!
By Douglas Grunther
Here is just a sampling of the virulent attacks on the most collaborative medium ever invented:
“The internet is stealing our children’s minds and souls.”
“Social media is a plague, breeding narcissism, anxiety, and depression at unprecedented levels.”
“We’ve created a digital monster that’s devouring our children’s attention spans and critical thinking skills.”
But when we shine a light on the history of communication, we realize that, ever since the invention of written language, ANY advance in communication technology is met with anguished concerns. It is nothing new.
When the television screen became standard in virtually every U.S. home during the 1960s, there were screams about the scourge of addiction. As Elizabeth Hartney wrote on the website VeryWellMind, “Although early research into TV addiction was limited, the concept of TV addiction was relatively well accepted by parents, educators, and journalists, as television watching became more common, particularly among children.”
A 1973 study published by the American Psychological Association concluded that early childhood exposure to TV violence predicted aggressive behavior for both males and females in adulthood.
The same heightened concerns about the influence of television were also directed at the invention of the printing press as it spread through the Northern European Renaissance in the 15th century. Carl Gessner, a respected Swiss scientist at that time, described how the printing press overwhelmed people with an overabundance of data that was both “confusing and harmful” to the mind, a warning referring to the “seemingly unmanageable flood of information.”
How about the invention of written language…could anyone of higher intelligence have been critical of that? It turns out that Plato, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of all time, had deep concerns. As media philosopher Marshall McLuhan pointed out, Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, had Socrates argue that the discovery of the alphabet would “create forgetfulness in the learner’s soul” and that people would trust not their own memories but the external written characters. He went on to say that disciples would be given only the semblance of truth and, while appearing omniscient, would generally know nothing.
Flash forward about 3,000 years to our digital era, when neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell points out in his article, “Don’t Touch That Dial! A History of Media Technology Scares, From the Printing Press to Facebook:” “Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.”
Here in the 21st century, with the power of computer intelligence expanding the digitally connected environment at speeds never before experienced by the human brain, the anxiety levels attendant to the arrival of any new media throughout history are predictably ramping up at astonishing levels.
As McLuhan also pointed out, every new media technology alters the sense ratios of the human brain. The personal computer arrived less than 45 years ago, yet now over five billion of us are connected through computers into a totally new digital, globalized world, causing explosive rupturing of traditional forms of education, jobs, and other cultural aspects.
In 2021, one of the best “big picture” essayists of the current age, Farhad Manjoo, wrote in The New York Times: “We — the news media in particular and society generally — may be tripping into a trap that has gotten us again and again: A moral panic in which we draw broad, alarming conclusions about the hidden dangers of novel forms of media, new technologies, or new ideas spreading among the youth.”
The trap he references is the failure to recognize McLuhan’s insight: every new media technology alters the sense ratios of the human brain, and we need to give ourselves time to adjust.
We can agree that in the age of the digital screen, the “constant stream of rich information” becomes a raging, debilitating FLOOD if we don’t adjust how we connect to it, including the need to take ample time away from the digital screen, re-orienting ourselves in nature, spending more quiet time in personal contemplation and inner reflection.
At the same time, the evolutionary trajectory towards greater connectivity continues, challenging us to take advantage of the boundary-expanding, potentially enlightening new possibilities within a globally hyper-linked Web.
Much will depend on a phrase I’ve always found intriguing: “To pay attention.” In modern cultures built so heavily on material consumption, on an existential need to make, to own, and to control more “stuff,” we attach the monetary word “pay” to the concept of “attention.” There’s wisdom in this phrase, as what we actually pay attention to determines, in large measure, how we think about, feel about, and act in the world. The “cost” of what we “pay” attention to is quite significant. Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, author of the fascinating book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, has some of the best insights on this. He writes: “The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to…attention changes what kind of thing comes into being for us: in that way, it changes the world.”
The vehement tirades aimed at the addictive nature of the 21st-century digital screen have merit. But it’s useful to put it in the larger context: Plato, accusing the invention of the alphabet of causing forgetfulness of our true connection to nature, Gessner’s attack on the “unmanageable flood of information” caused by the printing press, and the loud critics bemoaning a TV screen in every house were accurate in their criticisms as well. But would we have been better off today if the alphabet, the printing press, and TV were discarded due to the anxieties and dislocations they originally created?
Evolution has given us humans a brain that is both highly addictive and, at the same time, capable of deep insight and brilliant leaps of imagination. With over five billion of us globally connected to both the best and worst of human activity, what we “pay attention to,” now more than ever, will likely determine what the future brings. I’m reminded of John Lennon’s great lyric, written during the height of the cultural shape-shifting 1960s: “You tell me it’s the institution. Well, you know, you better free your mind instead.”
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About the Author
Douglas Grunther is the creator/host of the Woodstock Roundtable, a rollicking–and multi-award-winning–radio talk show spiced with humor and informed by his love of philosophy, depth psychology, and spiritual insight. His guests have been among the most original visionaries of our era. Grunther graduated from Columbia University, where he was a Rhodes Scholarship finalist. He has been the featured speaker in front of national audiences. He is a dreamwork facilitator certified by Dr. Jeremy Taylor, Co-Founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
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