Now comes the voice of Johann Hari, author of the recently published book, Stolen Focus, an exploration into declining attention spans and the deterioration of our individual and collective ability to think deeply. A lucid exposition that, alas, many readers may find difficult to follow.
Below, a few brief excerpts from an interview with the exceptionally skillful podcaster Kamea Chayne:
HUMAN BRAIN FOLLOWING THREE HOURS ON FACEBOOK
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OK, now that we have your full attention: surely the time has come, for the thousandth time, to delete your Facebook account.
Listing the reasons would consume a year’s worth of DP, yet we are grateful to a DP correspondent for alerting us to a powerfully concise summary in the Opinion pages of the NYT, written by the ever-lucid Jamelle Bouie.
Excerpts below, with images and captions added by DP.
FROM THE RED PILL TO THE RED BUTTON
FAREWELL TO THE ZUCKED THUMB
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Now comes writer-researcher Clara Hendrickson, with a lucid critique of the political delusion at the heart of social media. Her Boston Review essay is excerpted below, with images from Andrei Lacatusu’s project, Social Decay.
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Regarding those deeply interested and engaged with dismantling democracy, we urge brief meditation upon the following communication, that exceeds even the darkest impulse towards satire, given the events of recent days, weeks, months:
Followed by a random headline from today’s news “feed”:
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Let us give the last word to James Madison:
“As the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers; so there are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.”
On the weekend following a grand announcement by a toxic media company that they would no longer prioritize filter-bubble content from commercial entities on its “news” feed, we are indebted to a correspondent for alerting us to a forthcoming book by Adam Alter (the irony of his initials does not escape us here at DP) that details the relationship between technology and behavioral addiction. Excerpts below, relayed from Wired. Images are from the studio of Nancy Murphy Spicer.
YOU ALWAYS OVERDO IT
SCRAMBLED HEAD
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The head guru of the toxic media company, speaking to the New York Times, made the following statement: “It’s important to me that when Max and August [his two daughters] grow up that they feel like what their father built was good for the world.” Yet his entire business model is built on exploiting weakness, alienation and vulnerability in which participants become unwitting (and unpaid) miners of their own subjectivity.
Writing in Counterpunch, anthropologist Roberto González notes:
Last month, just three weeks before Christmas, Facebook issued a press release declaring the arrival of “Messenger Kids.” According to the company, the app was developed in consultation with parents and “parenting experts” to keep it safe for kids. Facebook has also promised to limit the collection of data on children, and to not use the app for advertising.
Such promises are disingenuous. It is clear that “Messenger Kids” is part of a long-term strategy designed to get children hooked on its social networking habits (“likes,” text messaging, filter bubbling) as early as possible. In other words, to get kids’ dopamine levels surging in the formative years–so that frequent dopamine bursts become a normal part of life. Once that happens, it will be even easier for future social media companies (which are fundamentally advertising firms) to feed billions of behavioral addicts customized propaganda.
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One simple direct action that every thinking person can perform to resist the “irresistible”: delete all social pseudo-networks, withdraw from the data mine to the maximum extent possible and refuse to eat (and be digested by) junk internet media.
Generations to come will be grateful for such action, taken by large numbers.
In his influential 2011 book The Shallows, media critic Nicholas Carr examined the impact of the internet on subjective consciousness and a range of cognitive and emotional competences, including the ability to follow complex narratives and the capacity to identify empathically with the suffering of others. Towards the end of the book, Carr writes:
What matters in the end is not our becoming but what we become. In the 1950s, Martin Heidegger observed that the looming “tide of technological revolution” could “so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” Our ability to engage in “meditative thinking,” which he saw as the very essence of our humanity, might become a victim of headlong progress. The tumultuous advance of technology could, like the arrival of the locomotive at the Concord station, drown out the refined perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that arise only through contemplation and reflection. The “frenziedness of technology,” Heidegger wrote, threatens to “entrench itself everywhere”.
It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls.
Writing for the Boston Globe this past April, Carr turns his attention to social media, with a particular focus on Facebook and the myth that hypertrophic connectivity automatically builds community and mutual understanding, fostering a new iteration of the technologically mediated Global Village utopia that has been around since the advent of mass electronic media.
The heart of his essay is excerpted below, intercut with images from Banksy’s 2014 mural depicting Mobile Lovers framed by the dark barbed wire of their smartly connected selves.
Desperado Philosophy 