What are we losing?
Media as tools, ecology, and culture.
Before we move on, I think it’s helpful to summarize what we’ve explored so far:
Mediums dictate the form of messages that can go through them. Not all communication is created to carry all types of messages.
Media extend our senses. In the “electric” age, this has caused us a great deal of anxiety.
To learn about what’s happening to us in the electric world, it’s helpful to look at the oral world. There are many parallels between the two.
The electric world gives rise to the Global Village, but it’s a village that looks much different from the old villages.
The electric media of our day allow us to live free of context. This lack of “embedding” in any specific environment leads us to be all over the place without ever having to leave home.
So, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
I think that’s the question our mind immediately jumps to. Last week, following Neil Postman's work in Amusing Ourselves to Death, I think we came down rather hard in the “It’s a bad thing” camp. There are many reasons to think of the changes that electric media have brought as a bad thing. But perhaps that is too harsh.
In 2004, when Facebook first arrived on the scene for High School students, I hopped right on board. A year or two earlier, I had successfully lobbied my parents for a cell phone, and before that, thanks to my dad’s IT job, we always had a good computer around to allow for plenty of text-based instant messaging. Each of those steps felt like progress. I was able to connect with people and chat for hours on end. I made friends in Starcraft and Command & Conquer and generally felt at home in my internet-mediated communication world.
Years before Facetime was a thing, I figured out how to make NetMeeting work with MSN Messenger and had video calls with my friends. It felt really cool and unique at the time, but today, these technologies are readily available and let us connect and forge better relationships.
The ubiquitous internet has allowed more people to connect than ever before.
During this last year of the Global Pandemic, Zoom calls and Insta-stories have allowed us to say connected in a way never before possible in human history in similar connections. Even beyond the pandemic, the internet has provided people opportunities on society's fringes to make their voices heard.
So, given all the benefits that our instantaneous communication media have, even in light of the “context switching” costs we talked about in the last post, is our current media world really all that bad?
It’s always a trade-off.
Whether we want to admit it or not, any media change is always a trade-off. When we transition from email to Slack, it seems all great. Slack (or Webex or Teams or whatever you use) allows me to quickly get in touch with anyone without the friction of having to open up and compose a message. And that’s just a media change within a single type (both are instantaneous).
It’s important to recognize the cost of reduced friction. Since it’s less work to send a message, every flippant and unformed thought gets sent off without the (typically slightly more) reflection that goes into an email message. This is not to say that everyone works like this, but the tool promotes this lack of friction as purely a good thing. We must stop and recognize what we are gaining and losing with the switch.
We are always gaining something and losing something when we transition from one media to another, even seemingly “superior” media.
I think Neil Postman put it well:
Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, "What will a new technology do?" is no more important than the question, "What will a new technology undo?" Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently.1
Last year, I became a fan of the work of Cal Newport. In his 2017 book Digital Minimalism, he defines his titular concept as
A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. 2
I think this gets at a very relevant concept for perhaps what we should “do” with all this information we’ve been walking through. If we agree that our full embrace of electric communications is causing us to lose something, what are we willing to do to limit those negative effects while still getting the benefits? Newport uses the example of the Mennonites3 as a culture that allows measured use of technology without fully becoming enveloped in its trappings as the Mennonites see it.
And that brings us to one final note for this discussion. It’s easy to think that the particular media we use to send a message on any given day is really only important to us but as Lance Strate, a modern-day torch-bearer of the McLuhan-Ong-Postman line of thinking4, notes:
cultures are produced by or emerge out of the media environments, and as media environments change, so do the cultures that they contain; cultures in turn can influence the media environment, but it is the media environment that is primary.5
This, Strate notes, contrasts with the way we typically think of media: as a product of the culture.
So, by the communications we send and the media we employ to do so, we build culture. And the Culture we live in is the summation of all of those individual choices.
One element we have not reflected on here is the impact of how we think about time in all these things. To a certain extent, that’s what Digital Minimalism is about: regaining control over time that we’ve surrendered (unintentionally) to digital tools.
So a question becomes: what is time, anyway?
See you next week as we continue our exploration.
Further Reading & Notes:
Digital Minimalism is a great, practical read about dealing with some broad (mostly negative) effects of electric media (though he never uses media ecology terms, its fingerprints are everywhere). Here’s an excerpt from an interview he did about that book and its premise (starting around 34:08, he addresses the core premise, but this whole video is worth a watch):
Media Ecology is the most widely used term for this line of thinking, started by McLuhan and continued through Ong and Postman, and still pursued today. You can read more about media ecology here.
Media Ecology, 26