Delights, Deceits, and Dangers of the Digital Age #1
Have you ever cooked a live frog?
You shouldn’t. But I’ve been told the trick is putting the frog into a pot of water at room temperature and then slowly turning up the heat until the frog is cooked. If you put the frog in when the water’s boiling it will jump out (This is an analogy. Please do not boil live frogs).
Change that is imperceptible effects us greatly. Even if we don’t realize it, perhaps especially because we don’t realize it.
It is very interesting and important to ask how we are being “cooked.” What impact is the digital age having on us?
Delights
First, I will not deny that the digital age has provided innumerable delights. I am not at all saying we should go back to the Stone Age or be Amish or something. I personally “like” Facebook and don’t mind Twitter. I like my iPhone even if it might be making me stupid.
We must, however, be aware that even if something is a delight it doesn’t mean we can consume it without thought. I find delight in ice cream but that does not mean that I consume it without discretion. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.
Deceits
Second, we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are connected with people and involved in community when we’re really just sitting on the toilet looking at what people are doing.
We can think that we’re smart, when it’s really just our smart phone. We are indiscriminately taught and sold a certain worldview and view of prospering by feeds, blogs, and tweets. Yet who articulates, let alone thinks about, the impact that Snapchat, Instagram, and our new phone appendage is having on us? Who checks their own pulse and asks if they are amusing their self to death?
Dangers
Third, there are obvious dangers in the deceits that we have covered above but there are also other dangers we should consider.
There is a danger in thinking FaceTime is equivalent to face time. Is it? Who’s asking? Who cares?
Are men and women (and boys and girls!) so shaped and familiar with pornography that actual real, human, face-to-face, relationships are becoming irrelevant? Are people asking this question? Do people care?
How is Snapchat, the limited characters of Twitter, and the funny sound bits all over the place shaping the way we think and concentrate? Is the new artform of memes impacting other more refined forms of art? Are people asking this question? Does anyone care?
I could go on and on with these types of questions. But I won’t. I’ve probably already exceeded the limits of our concentration!
There will be more to come. But perhaps I can start a much-needed conversation with all my fellow Snapchaters, tweeters, Instagrammers, and Facebook feeders that have a phone appendage like me.
Enter the Conversation
What thoughts do you have on the delights, deceits, and dangers of the digital age?
The Megalomania of Mass Media
Through Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (and remember MySpace?) we have a world essentially created in our image. It’s nice. But it also feeds our narcissistic souls.[i] We like what we want and we want what we like; and if you, a certain political agenda, a religious view, or a video, a picture, or an advertisement (the most difficult thing to avoid in our cyber-haven) gets in my way I have the right, without reproach, to scroll on by.
Media brings a form of megalomania but it can also be a monster to meaning. It destroys meaning by stripping it of its context and by placing weighty things into too close a proximity to funny dog videos. When posts about politics, pantiliners, and poodles all show up in our (raging and undirected directed) “stream” then we might be taking in not a stream but a torrent of incoherent information.
It seems that social media has great potential to create an anti-intellectual ivory tower. That is, it distances us from people and what is really going on and allows us to make unsubstantiated comments that haven’t truly been contemplated. If we don’t take in the protein and exercise of hard thought we’re going to be weak. If we feed on what’s frail and fruitless, we will be frail and fruitless.
Tweets and feeds won’t feed us. And we cannot understand politics in sixty-second-sound-bits. Racial reconciliation isn’t and can’t be reconciled, let alone understood, when we merely rely on social media; instead of deep, patient, embodied, social change.
Violence and vengeance, bullying and bad behavior, won’t be solved by ads alone; even if the words are backed by a famous actor, artist, or athlete (that ironically likely undercuts the very thing they’re supposedly trying to communicate).
Further, social media may fool us, but it won’t fill us. We may enjoy Instagram but we weren’t there, we aren’t now, or we didn’t receive enough “stars” (or whatever) to fill out our significance.
The “word” “tweet” is fitting for Twitter because although I myself have a Twitter the whole thing is not congruent. When sentences and phrases are sheared of their context they have about as much meaning as a bird tweeting. So when we “tweet” we may be performing a type of onomatopoeia (an onomatopoeia is a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the source of the sound that it describes). That is to say, to tweet is to not say anything; or, at least, anything that is human in an extended rational sense.
As humans we can hear more than “tweet, tweet, tweet.” We can take in and bask in beautiful poetry or follow powerful prose. We can be “intoxicated” in beautiful ways literarily, but not so much if we stick w/ texting & tweeting.
Thankfully Chopin and Beethoven’s media wasn’t a kazoo and a triangle, that media would have greatly hindered them. Could it be that our media is hurting and hindering us? Maybe sometimes we need to even focus on a medium. Maybe even pick up a pencil and paper, put away distractions, and put something powerful and substantial down. Something outside of us, beyond us, and not about us. Maybe it’s time to read a book and get off Facebook.
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[i] In the picture above by Caravaggio (1571-1610), Narcissus gazes at his own reflection and in a similar way we gaze into our computers, phones, and tablets. We narcissistically gaze at our profiles and our worlds that we have created in our image. Could we meet the same fate as Narcissus? Could we drown in a stream of information and technology?
in X 