I wrote a couple of months ago about the realization that I was very fit for the environment in which I grew up, and that I further chose to become a habitat specialist in the academic, mental habitat in which I resided.
I turn my attention now to forms of media — not “the media” as in the mainstream news organizations, but “the media” as in the forms of technology that united our communications as a culture: printed material, radio, but especially television and Internet. The media is the giver, an all but invisible but ever-present uber-entity that dispenses and allows connection among individuals, hovering over us like a metaphysical Tyrant or Gnostic demiurge, silent but powerful.
I see the role of the media as one of the major obstacles to my outward growth, and, at the same time, one of my greatest allies. The benefits are more obvious, for who can decry the sheer amount of information made available by the Internet, and speed of communication now possible?
The great destructiveness of the media is not really in the technologies themselves, but in the culture that celebrates and worships the media to the extent that it does. And the culture is this. Jerry Mander, in his 1970’s classic, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, wrote:
Most Americans spend their lives within environments created by human beings. This is less the case if you live in Montana than if you live in Manhattan, but it is true to some extent all over the country. Natural environments have largely given way to human-created environments.
What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel, and understand about the world has been processed for us. Our experiences of the world can no longer be called direct, or primary. They are secondary, mediated experiences.When we are walking in a forest, we can see and feel what the planet produces directly. Forests grow on their own without human intervention. When we see a forest, or experience it in other ways, we can count on the experience being directly between us and the planet. It is not mediated, interpreted, or altered.
On the other hand, when we live in cities, no experience is directly between us and the planet. Virtually all experience is mediated in some way. Concrete covers whatever would grow from the ground. Buildings block the natural vistas. The water we drink comes from a faucet, not from a stream or the sky. All foliage has been confined by human considerations and redesigned according to human tastes. There are no wild animals, there are no rocky terrains, there is no cycle of bloom and decline. There is not even night and day. No food grows anywhere.
Most of us give little importance to this change in human experience of the world, if we notice it at all. We are so surrounded by a reconstructed world that it is difficult to grasp how astonishingly different it is from the world of only one hundred years ago, and that it bears virtually no resemblance to the world in which human beings lived for four million years before that. That this might affect the way we think, including our understanding of how our lives are connected to any nonhuman system, is rarely considered.
Mander goes on to describe the effects of sensory deprivation experiments, and how, in the absence of any other stimuli, the subject goes into a trance state which results in “a dramatic increase in focus on any stimulus at all that is introduced. In such a deprived environment, one single stimulus acquires extraordinary power and importance.” And he likens modern indoor environments, and even outdoor ones, to precisely these sensory-reducing situations.
We live in a culture where it is normal to feel sensorily deprived.
Our environment no longer grows on its own, by its own design, in its own time. The environment in which we live has been totally reconstructed solely by human intention and creation.
We find ourselves living inside a kind of nationwide room. We look around it and see only our own creations.
We go through life believing we are experiencing the world when actually our experiences are confined within entirely human conceptions. Our world has been thought up.
… Living within artificial, reconstructed, arbitrary environments that are strictly the products of human conception, we have no way to be sure that we know what is true and what is not. We have lost context and perspective. What we know is what other humans tell us.
Therefore, whoever controls the processes of re-creation, effectively redefines reality for everyone else, and creates the entire world of human experience, our field of knowledge. We become subject to them. The confinement of our experience becomes the basis of their control of us.
The role of the media in all this is to confirm the validity of the arbitrary world in which we live.
In our sensory starvation, we are easily entranced, made receptive to whatever stimuli we seek out. As consumers, we have more control now than in the days before the Internet; but even with the Internet we’re all staring at a screen, sharing a common form of media.
In our state of sensory deprivation, doses of entertainment through television and computer are like food to a starving person. But this is no way to live long-term. In the absence of alternatives, we become addicted to these media. Just like white sugar.
I wrote several months ago that I was addicted to pre-digested forms of information, addicted to a diet of canned interaction via computer screen and printed word. This is the media, information that is mediated by other people — packaged and preserved for human consumption. But we are only human when in contact with a more-than-human world, as David Abram would say.
It can get complicated. In this sense-deprived wasteland, media can be an ambivalent salvation. Jason Godesky recently noted,
We seek community, and in an increasingly isolated world, we find that most readily electronically. Even here, amidst people who hope to rewild, we rarely find community in the flesh, so we turn on our computers and log online in the hopes of finding others we can connect with. I do not believe that electronic media present us with a more engaging experience than the more-than-human world. Far from it. But I do believe, and have personally experienced, how electronic media can overcome our increasing social isolation and put us in contact with one another, giving us forums and blogs and online communities and social networks that give us the palest imitation of the genuine, deep community we yearn for.
But as we all acknowledge, this is a mere secondary advantage, a way of seeing that the glass is not mostly empty, it’s really a little bit full.
It would be tempting to start criticizing the technology or the systems behind the media. To take media to task, though, defeats the purpose. The reawakening of the senses, the reenchantment of the world, is the real work. The media is like an opportunistic scavenger: It feeds where it can. We have a symbiotic relationship with the media superorganism because it fills our needs, and it only becomes pathological because our need is so great.
In the midst of this, we’re lost in our ability to really relate, even to other people, with any authenticity. We lose our ability even to relate to our own bodies. The tech-geek who doesn’t bathe or have any social skills — that stereotype has truth. And that’s who we’re all becoming.
As for me, I find myself losing energy and power to media on a daily basis, in a desperate search for ways to connect and commune. It is simply the most familiar way, and the easiest one. I can reach out and commune with a tree more easily now than I could in years past but it’s still that much easier to click a mouse and hop online. And, too, communing with a tree is not the same as communing with other human beings; it’s always been human energy that I’ve really felt the lack of.
Deeper down it all comes from a wish that I didn’t have to shift into an altered state of consciousness to feel connected. But if I have to, I might as well choose the altered state that carries an ease born of familiarity, and tune in to the screen.
I’d like to break that, but I need alternatives. Talking to trees is only part of the picture.
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