Disabling Media
Posted August 28th, 2023 at garyborjesson.substack.com
In a recent session, a young woman was telling me she’d been feeling down and hadn’t been sleeping well. When I asked what was on her mind, she named some familiar culprits: climate change, the destruction and smoke from wildfires, the erosion of democracy and the rise of fascism. Slumped on the couch, she said, “And that’s just the beginning. The world feels hopeless.”
Before I say what happened next, let me assure you that I obscure identifying characteristics of any patients, students, friends, or family mentioned here. I hope that drawing on my professional and personal experience helps bring to life the very human concerns we’re exploring. I expect most people will relate to the examples. In this case, of course, there’s zero danger of singling out my patient. For I could as easily be speaking about myself, a family member, a friend, even, possibly, about you. We’re all swimming in the same waters.
As I listened, I was showing I understood what she was thinking and feeling. For again, we’re more open to help when we trust that the other person knows where we’re coming from—that their attention is directed to our specific situation. Another way of saying this is, I don’t treat anxiety or depression or addiction, but I do work with people who suffer from these.
Given what was on her mind, I asked the obvious question: what media was she consuming, and when and where she was consuming it? I’ve learned it’s useful to get into the weeds, so we walked hour-by-hour through a typical day. She was on her iPhone periodically throughout the day, and “for an hour or two” each night before bed, “unwinding” with Instagram, TikTok, Apple News, and the New York Times. As she said “unwinding” she smiled bitterly. Picking up on that smile, I playfully said, “I think it’s time for an intervention. Are you willing to go over a few things you probably already know? I’ll offer you the reminders I give myself.”
I say “reminders” because most of them are as self-evident as the nose on our face, and as easy to overlook. My patient’s smile showed she knew about the connection between her use of media and her suffering, and that she had somehow been overlooking it until that moment. What makes electronic media insidious is that it’s easy to fall into a trance and neglect what’s actually happening.
David Foster Wallace offers an apt reflection that applies here. He begins a commencement speech titled “This is water” with the following parable: “Two young fish are swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish who nods to them and says, ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on a ways, then one of them looks at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” For water, read media.
My intervention was meant to remind us both of the media waters we’re swimming in, and how her experience of anxiety and hopelessness was largely being manufactured—programmed—by that media. This leads to the first reminder, which was that in fact she is not getting an actual view of the world. Thus it cannot be the actual state of the world that’s depressing her. Instead, her attention is being targeted, captured, held, and exploited by algorithms designed to generate profit. She was seeing a disfigured simulacrum of the world, programmed by the media for its benefit, not hers. She was seeing through their screen, darkly.
The second reminder was that her felt experience is indeed being intentionally darkened. Why? Because it is a feature of our brains that negative emotions more reliably capture our attention than positive ones. This negativity bias is exploited by media, which profits from capturing our attention. That’s why most news is bad news. The water we’re swimming in is murky and bloody, because if it bleeds it leads.
Now imagine an alternate reality where media more accurately captured our actual world. For every story about the war in Ukraine, there would be a dozen stories of countries quietly enjoying mutually beneficial relations. There would of course be countless stories about beautiful children being born to overjoyed parents.
The Onion gets it!
There’d be stories about innovations helping solve social, health, and ecological problems. Naturally there’d be stories on the joy puppies and kittens bring. I like to imagine that the leading story would frequently be about how different people are enjoying gloriously uneventful days: raising children, doing good work, enjoying time with their partners and friends, making art, making love, making food, running in the woods with their dog, getting a good night’s sleep, and waking refreshed.
In the next note, I’ll wrap up the intervention and offer a few tips for navigating the waters.