Digital Media Are Overwhelming Our Consciousness and Eclipsing Our Capacity for Reflection
July 1st, 2009Via: OnTheCommons:
One of the more pernicious enclosures of the commons is the enclosure of time and consciousness. It’s pernicious because it is so subtle and rarely discerned. When commercial values such as productivity and efficiency become so pervasive and internalized, they crowd out other ways of being. Our very sense of humanity — full-bodied, spontaneous, spiritual — leaches away.
All of this was brought home clearly in a provocative lecture that I attended yesterday evening. It was called “No Time to Think,” by David M. Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. Levy gave a chilling historical overview of how American society has become enslaved to an ethic of “more-better-faster” and is losing touch with the capacity for reflection and intuitive thinking. In an overweening commitment to constant doing and making, analyzing and thinking (which, let us note, are important human activities), we can too easily close off access to an entire realm of consciousness that is at least as important, our capacity for reflection.
Levy’s research is focused on why the technological devices that are designed to connect us also seem to radically dis-connect us. As Levy puts it, “We now have the most remarkable tools for teaching and learning the world has ever known. How is it that we have less time to think than ever before?” Although our society supposedly prizes creative thought, it in fact gives little respect to the intuitive and the contemplative.
The “information society” has a certain frenetic mindlessness to it, one that takes Henry David Thoreau’s famous line in Walden to a new level entirely: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Twitter may be all the rage, but surely there is something pathetic about the ascendance of Twittering as our unstructured, person-to-person social time dwindles away.
This trend has only accelerated, and become more internalized, as more and more digital technologies have become incorporated into our daily routines. Email, cell phones, text-messaging, voicemail, Facebook, instant-messaging, Twitter, and of course the World Wide Web – they all serve useful roles. But I also realize at times that the digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
This article assumes that human consciousness and reflection are relevant to anything remotely significant. Anyone familiar with basic evolution and physics know the molecular world to be the level of significance when it comes to existence and the microbal world to be the level of significance when it comes to that minor spin-off of existence we call life. Adding digital media to human experience is like adding talcum powder to chalk. So what? Large animals in general are the single most irrelevant objects in existence. They come into being and go extinct on a regular basis with absolutely no impact on the molecular and microbal worlds.
Time for a reflection might be a problem for some upper middle class professional but for somebody doing some boring menial shit paying job they could do in their sleep they have all the time in the world to reflect on how they are going to make ends meet this month.
Well, i wanted to write a similar comment.
Today we just see how stupid we all are – and how stupid the collective really is. The digital hyperworld just clarifies that with evidence, which wasn’t available before (only to those intelligent enough to think about it; we call them “philosophers”). The way to this knowledge is much more simpler for the masses through the brave new digital world, because it connects the mass itself. Admittedly not the mass, but some fifth. The perception today is so difficult for those over 40, which are the most pessimistic today, regarding the new media. Regarding everything else, they’re just clueless. This everything else is the realm of the new media generation.
But anyway, as a human being, i am almost obliged to believe we will someday really matter to this universe. But that will take a loooooooong time 🙂
@ Peregrino
Uh, human consciousness and reflection are relevant to humans, although perhaps not to ultra-terrestrial archons who exist across 10 dimensions like yourself.
haha, ltcolonelnemo, you got me again. also your comment about the attacks on shell in nigeria. you’re on a roll, brotha.