Disabling the Media
Posted September 4th, 2023 at garyborjesson.substack.com
The unexamined life is not worth living. - Socrates
In last week’s note I described an intervention with a patient whose media use was fueling her anxiety and depression. Because we have a good alliance, I chose to be playful but provocative. I told her that the world she views through the lens of media is not in fact the world at all, but a for-profit manipulation of it designed to capture and exploit her attention. I described how the negative emotions she feels are by design, since these better capture her attention.
Now I’ll share the final point I made: When under the influence of our devices and media, our thoughts and feelings are not as much our own as we believe. I asked her to imagine she lived in a simulation, but didn’t know it. As far as she knew, she was just living her life, doing as she chooses, thinking her thoughts, feeling her feelings. Whereas in fact she’s being set-up to think, feel, and behave in predictable ways. It could be an alien teenager is using their game controller to put her (their avatar) in certain situations, like endless doom scrolling or binging Netflix. Or it may just be that the simulation’s algorithms are tailoring her experience to fit the programmers’ needs. “That’s pretty creepy”, she half smiled.
It’s not that the feelings are being put in us, exactly. Rather, it’s that when we’re put in specific situations, we humans respond in depressingly predictable ways. Of course, this was already old news, even in the Buddha’s and Socrates’ time. In our time, we’ve just learned more about the specific ways we get fooled. In Thinking Fast and Slow,research psychologist Daniel Kahneman details how “your actions and emotions can be primed by events of which you are not aware.”1
For example, if you are reminded of money or if you have much money, you become more “selfish….reluctant to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others.” In another experiment, teenage subjects who had been primed by seeing words like “age” and “old” (without any context that suggested old age) left the building walking more slowly—since that’s how old people behave. (I love that this is called the “Florida effect”.)
The subjects in such experiments have no awareness they’ve been primed to think or feel or behave as they do. Even after being informed by the researchers, they insist they haven’t been thus influenced. So too, my patient initially denied that her mood was as effected by media as in fact it was. Who wants to believe they’re being gamed? That unknown forces are shaping how we think and feel?
Turning to what she can do about it, I suggested she could learn more about how media works. She could start with the documentary The Social Dilemma, which shows how we think we’re the end-users, but in fact we’re the product: Our attention is a commodity, bought and sold. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony that I was recommending she watch something. So was she!) For a deeper dive and a bracing read, there is Adam Alter’s book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.
I finished by saying, playfully, “I’m going to tell you one more thing you already know”: the best practice is to use media intentionally and moderately. And don’t use devices at all for a couple hours before bedtime—if you want to sleep well and be in a better mood. If she didn’t believe all this, she could run her own experiments. She could go cold turkey from all news and social media. Or, more realistically, she could restrict her use in the recommended ways, and see what she notices.
Taking a step back, we can see how our predicament with devices and media reflects a more general human predicament: We suffer from ignorance. As Socrates noted, our suffering is compounded when we are unaware of our ignorance—and thus unable to remedy it. (The Buddha made much the same point, as did Freud, among many others.) Sure, it’s embarrassing and even humiliating to recognize how suggestible we are, and how easily deluded, but it’s worth knowing. Especially if you believe, with Socrates, that the examining life is more worth living.
1Daniel Kahneman (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. See pp. 51-62.