I live in a small town where people are not quite so socially isolated as they are said to be in some cities. Reading this, I was beginning to feel that it was "someone else's problem" until I started reflecting on the fact that when my wife and go to out weekly neighborhood game night to play old-fashioned word games, nearly everyone keeps their phones turned on and out on the table. The conversation often consists either of comments on what has just arrived on their screens and counter-comments illustrated with material instantly searched up on the same screens. What I find odd about this is that everyone at the table considers this normal. And keep in mind that this is not a young crowd, but rather, a bunch of retired boomers.
One idea: A study of how media consumption affects markers of success in life. I understand there's a "chicken and egg" issue, but if parents knew that their kids consumption of media was statistically correlated with college, income. marriage, etc. that might be powerful.
A long-term study of children where one group’s parents are told to keep them away from all digital entertainment and see the effects. It would take a long time and a lot of funding. And the results may show that the children ended up viewing digital entertainment anyway, though they may have a decreased amount of screen time. And people wouldn’t do much with the information even if there was a huge difference in outcomes.
I am originally from Western New York (I grew up just north of the PA border), and when I was in high school studying American history, I learned that Western New York in the early 1800s was a hotbed of social and cultural agitation. Who knew?! As a result of the Second Great Awakening mentioned by Brink, WNY came to be known as the "Burned-over District" due to the number of religious, political, and social movements that "burned over" WNY. Some examples: near Canandaigua we find the place where Mormons believe that Joseph Smith was led to the golden tables by the Angel Maroni; the hamlet of Lily Dale became a hotbed of Spiritualism, and even to this day, you can go there in summer and have your fortune read; the nationally-famous Chautauqua Institute was founded by Lake Chautauqua; Seneca Falls, where the Seneca Falls Convention took place in 1848; Harriet Tubman eventually settled in Central New York; Frederick Douglass lived and is now buried in Rochester, NY; Scottish/proto-Canadian revolutionary William Lyon McKenzie also settled in Rochester after he was chased out of Canada for fomenting rebellion (in fact, he founded the "Republic of Canada" on Navy Island in the Niagara River, which is currently off-limits due to excavations related to his ill-fated republic; etc.
Although some of these movements/events were religious in nature, most of them were secular, and WNY was considered to have a fervent population, in the words of one of my American history professor. Apparently, a very popular song at this time in WNY was "King Alcohol"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2RpJMJk_5s, composed by the Hutchinson Family Singers, the same group who composed "Lincoln and Liberty Too".
I don't see why many of us cannot be induced to feel that same moral fervor again when it comes to media!
When Brink mentions "like buttons", I'm reminded of the writings of Jonathan Haidt, who claims that the creation of "like buttons" and the sharing of social media content that was enabled on FB and then Twitter between 2010 and 2015 play a significant role in why Americans largely live in two silos and who don't understand the other's language (he has a book coming out on this very topic, "After Babel", in 2024 or 2025, I believe). Bad news often travels faster than good news, and social media has enabled this kind of sharing on a scale unseen until our days.
I work in public education and many of my students express that they are lonely. It's unsurprising that so many of them, even elementary-aged kids, spend so much solitary time playing games, binging YouTube, etc. Many of them lack a solid social/familial foundation, and so when they find themselves alone, they are doubly-alone. This has contributed to a surge in suicidal ideation among young people; in fact, I'm seeing more of it at the elementary level these days than ever before, and we all try to help support our most vulnerable students survive. Safety is the number one job of the school, and only when we are safe can we attend to the education of the children. My secondary colleagues noted that around 2015, many students started fighting with teachers about having to do pair or group work. "I might actually disagree with someone, and I don't want to feel those feelings", I overheard one teen say to my colleague. The pandemic made this much worse for so many, obviously.
As for reading, I encourage my students to read ebooks, audiobooks, print books, etc. I will say that in the decade and a half that I've been doing this work, I've noticed that more and more students are uninterested in chapter books ("too many words") and are instead gravitating to manga and graphic novels. While I don't have anything against those formats per se, one can't help realize that our students are less able to handle any kind of difficult prose. I have a friend who works in one of the most affluent school districts in WNY, and she says that even in that district, the high schools are having to move from Shakespeare in original Modern English to "Shakespeare for Dummies" or some such thing; and that they are striking novels from the curriculum in favor of short stories and verse, as these are much more easily digestible by the students. I don't have the objective data to back up my argument, as that's not my line of work, but anecdotally I can assure you that in the short-term at least, our kids' attention spans and reading levels seem to be decreasing by the year. What that portends for our democratic republic? We only need to look at some of our most well-known politicians of the last decade or so to understand that many lack the ability to critically think.
When Brink says that "the rise of contemporary authoritarian populism here in the United States was the creation of a small group of media entrepreneurs", while I don't disagree with that assertion, I feel that he left out someone who sowed a lot of distrust in government, particularly the federal government: Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who exclaimed that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem". It was he who helped lay the groundwork for many conservatives' distrust of the federal government by such utterance, and over the course of the '80's until now, we see that same "government is the problem" mentality among many Republican politicians, which is then coupled with the conservative "infotainment" that panders to conservative-leaning citizens. About 3 decades after Reagan, we have Ron Suskind quoting an unnamed source in the Bush Administration that: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do". By "you", he was referring to the "reality-based community" (those of us who believe in a measurable, objective reality), and it's widely believe that Karl Rove was the source of this quote. We then move up to Kellyanne Conway's reference to "alternative facts".
If we lump this all together, we see in the American conservative moment wide swaths of people who not only not distrust, but despise the federal government, and who believe that they can disregard facts that don't comport with their own (many) cognitive biases. So while I don't disagree with Brink that conservative infotainment media is very much to blame for the propagation of this nonsense, I don't think we can leave Ronald Reagan aside when we think about why many on the right came to see the federal government as inherently problematic. I could be mistaken, but I think he was the first president (Republican or otherwise) to articulate such a view, and it certainly has had ramifications on conservative thinking over the decades.
An issue with the media, and I believe it was Neil Postman who pointed this out, is that before the media can inform, it has to entertain. If someone with a boring demeanor sits and stares at you through your tv and reports as much fact-based news as they can, practically nobody will watch it and the media company producing it will shift gears or go bankrupt. People seek entertainment, and while I'm no political scientist, we can simply watch this absurd moment from the 2015 GOP presidential candidate debates (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-2T_9yXIMA) to see that many Americans, particularly of Republican persuasion, love pugilistic and vacuous political theater. Now compare it to a Canadian prime ministerial debate from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSf2__qpeGA . No bombast, no dramatic music, no incivility. So while this counts as entertainment and information in Canada, it would be a snooze-fest in the US. Unfortunately, US media culture encourages a lot of the bombast and dramatics that we see in both Republican and Democratic debates (although it's in the Republican debates where we see rampant incivility, among other negative traits).
So in short (too late), while I am all in favor of a fervently moral cause of, we have an uphill battle in our current media environment in the US. I look forward to hearing from others what organizations already exist, and/or what ideas they have, relating to how we can help lay the groundwork for such a moral cause.
The big missing piece here seems to be that the temperance movement for alcohol first came out of a widespread and shared set of religious beliefs amongst the populace. If you don't have that, then in my opinion any attempt at temperance is dead in the water.
Why would the average person be willing to put down their phone and avoid the superstimuli of Tiktok, or Netflix? Because intellectuals online argue it's useful? I highly doubt it.
While religious movements have their problems, they do help us simplify issues like this one, where the quick and easy answer individually is actually far worse for society in the long run. Unfortunately until our modern worship of individual freedoms and consumerism is changed, no temperance movement is even close to possible.
Consider the cultural turn against smoking in recent decades--another kind of "temperance" movement with no religious component at all. The risk to physical health--and the risks imposed on third parties through passive smoking--made it easier, I think, for such a purely secular movement to gain traction. But I don't think its impossible that the spike in mental health problems among young people, combined with the widespread recognition that most of us are now addicted to our phones, could motivate a similar cultural turn against unhealthy media consumption.
True, and I conceded in another comment that it is certainly possible.
I am skeptical though as I see the wins against smoking to be more of a Scientism - doctors in white lab coats scolding people about their health as the arbiters of virtue. And the sort of technologist Scientism that rules our society would, to my mind, be difficult to turn against new technology given that new technology is the source of its power.
I think that there is some opportunity for this to happen, I think that at this point a lot of people know someone who they could describe as to obsessed with media, even if the harmful effects are not the same as those from alcohol I think that can serve as a basis for a temperance movement to get some influence
Again, the backlash against alcohol was only possible based on a religious revival, as Brink himself cites. Absent of a true religious movement against technology, how are we going to convince people? Just telling folks it's bad for them isn't enough, especially since so much of culture and business happens online nowadays.
And as you note, people have to be online. It's not optional in today's world.
On the other hand, today, more and more people have quit drinking, eating sugar, spanking children, and smoking cigarettes without a shared religion. We wear seatbelts and use car seats for kids without a shared religion.
Eh, I'd argue that the shared religion is more of a religion of Scientism where doctors wielding faulty scientific studies have taken over the priestly class. The main virtue is health, or at least extension of life.
Anyway, it's definitely possible that apparatus can be used to curtail technology use, although I'm skeptical since the same regime of Scientism requires and exacerbates technological saturation for a number of reasons. Point conceded though.
Modern media, social media in particular, is ruled by the algorithm. The data collected is fed into a black box formula that then picks and chooses the next thing to show up on the feed, all with the goal of keeping the user engaged for a few seconds longer so that their ads generate more revenue.
Social media is now like junk food, loaded with the precise amount of sugar to keep us coming back for more, engineered to satisfy primordial needs of our brain. I don't (yet) have a good solution for this problem at Risk+Progress, other than maybe the suggestion that we ought to regulate the algorithms themselves...not too much, just enough to ensure that users are occasionally fed that which they don't want to see, just enough to break the cycle.
Free speech does not protect algorithmic manipulation. Laws could mitigate these social ills by setting standards and defining actionable fraud, willful deceit, and abuse of power in the algorithmic space. Civil and criminal penalties seem possible. It is at least worth debating.
Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?
It seems to me that the temperance movement had strong institutional support from organized religion, which no longer has much oomph, and from women with time on their hands, which may not be the case now that women are in the labor force.
Who will drive a temperance movement, and won’t people be tempted to “outsource” their moral pressure to government policy, which we know was counterproductive when the temperance movement tried it?
I love the connection between the second great awakening and the perfectibility of humans with temperance. A great example of how a cultural ethos can evolve in deep and enduring ways. I'll put in a plug here for my neighbor, Holly Jackson's, book American Radicals (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566131/american-radicals-by-holly-jackson/) which looks at the utopian movements of the mid 1800's inspired by the same fervor.
As for media temperance -- a brilliant idea. But I would argue for an even bigger step: A technology temperance movement. Before we let new technology into our lives, ask ourselves: "Does it spark joy?" Recognize that technology is a scalable, viral, opt-out system. It takes work to say "no." Personal and societal growth, conversely is a slow moving "opt-in" system. It takes work to set personal and human standards and hold ourselves to them. Like temperance, a worthy goal, however frequently we fall short.
"Instead of an Orwellian thought police what we have is more like thought social workers and therapists - a great spider’s web of journalists, scriptwriters, opinionated actors, pop academics and advertising ‘creatives’, alternately flattering you, nagging at you and generally helping you to think correctly. It is a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone - even its own media elite - that brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It ‘keeps you informed’ with ‘The News’ and it entertains you with tv film and drama. It’s not that - in the West anyway - The News is generally a deliberate attempt to tell lies. It’s actually worse than that: the very concept is flawed. Flawed by virtue of editorial selectivity; by virtue of newsroom groupthink; by virtue of a journalistic mindset whereby the dramatic narrative is more important than the actual subject matter and worst of all by the illusion that the consumer of news can really know what is going on all over the world just by looking at your screen." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
In my view (and my experience) most people are not that self-aware - they have a kind of defence mechanism that enables them to put a favorable gloss on their own motivations. T.S. Eliot hit the nail on the head: "They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” (I wonder, did you read the essay I linked to my comment?)
Okay, I’ve read your link, which addresses fiction not news media. I understand your point. But deliberate lying by powerful politicians who know better still seems to me more corrosive of trust than any amount of unconscious or conscious bias that leaks into fiction. Good faith matters. So does its lack.
Western institutions desire to make people "consumers". With fine tuned algorithms and social controls they shape desires, attitudes and appetites and make people captive subjects just as if they were ruled by Totalitarian despots. The path to freedom is for each person to discipline themselves on what they consume and why. For each person to be more skeptical of what they are told to believe and to push back against and challenge "narrative" reporting.
It would also help if America's institutions quit the propaganda game and instead promoted high ideals and principles. You wrote on this in your essay:
"The tragedy of all this finger pointing and desperate virtue signalling is that the authentic voice of Western liberalism – a general goodwill towards all decent fellow human beings and a general dislike of bullies of all stamps – is left no quarter. You either talk the pc talk or you are automatically deemed a bigot whereas it is the pc pieties themselves that are just the latest form of bigotry."
As with most claims about digital media, a lot of this could be said about paper, and was. Before computers, I spent most of my work time looking at pieces of paper, and much of my leisure time with my nose stuck in a book (sometimes improving, sometimes escapist tripe).
I agree that revolutions in communications technology always bring major disruptions. The printing press made the Reformation possible, and with it the mass bloodletting of the Wars of Religion. The advent of the novel occasioned a fair amount of moral panic (after the string of suicides provoked by Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, and broader handwringing about ladies filling their heads with romantic mush). But I will stand by my assessment that print cognitive culture is vastly superior to TV and internet cognitive culture. And as to addictiveness, it's common to see a party at a restaurant with everybody lost in their private phone universe; not so common to see a dinner party with everybody's nose in a book.
Hopefully there will be an algorithm that will save us from the other algorithms. An operating system with a nanny ai baked in that stops us from viewing addictive media, makes us go to bed, and steers us into pro-social activities like making plans with friends and playing augmented reality games with friends in-person instead of the binging. That’s the only realistic solution I see outside of small cult-like communities of luddites. But still, most will choose an apple, android or windows operating system and will slip into the matrix of 23/7 VR use.
"Decades of such pandering created the contemporary GOP base, totally detached from consensus reality and demanding ever-more lurid political theater."
I marvel at the cognitive dissonance of pundits who so proudly display their bias and ignorance. First, the exploitation of emotions was mastered by the Democratic party. In one of their most notorious 1990s attack ads they had Republican politicians literally causing "granny" to careen over a cliff in her wheelchair. This tactic of casting Republicans as heartless and hateful has been used by Democrats for decades. This has been standard mainstream media bias going back to at least Nixon.
The political genius of Trump was he demolished his GOP opponents by using Democrat political strategies. In particular the strategy of directly attacking and neutering opponents. You know who did this best? Obama. Obama became President in a few short years because he used low tactics to take out first his Senate competition and then his Presidential competition.
Trump coupled the strategy of personal political destruction with a broad outreach of attracting voters by criticizing establishment Republicans for their many failed policies. This was too easy! Why was it so easy? It is because the establishment GOP platform is detached from reality. So too is the establishment DNC platform. Trump could have just as well crashed the DNC but the task was so much easier with the GOP.
Observe that Trump is much more moderate in his political views than is characterized. Observe that for all Trump's barking he was never radical. Compared to the policy changes made now by Biden and previously by Obama, Trump's administration was boring and mainstream. The narrative that Trump was extreme is divorced from reality. And if Trump was extreme, how do we characterize Biden and Obama who utterly destroyed norms of American law and governance?
It is fascinating to watch the media deception take place in real time and for pundits to fall for it. Characters like Trump are media creations. It is the media and professional reporters that focus on Trump's influence and ignore his policies. The media builds up Trump as a king and then feigns insult when Trump behaves like a gluttonous monarch. Professional wrestling has nothing on the fakery that we see in political reporting
If the media focused on actual debate and leadership substance then Trump would be taken down a few notches. But such reporting would threaten almost all political royalty and the media would hate to lose friends in powerful places.
So instead blame the "right wing conspiracy". Deflect responsibility and say the Boogeyman did it. Lazy thinking, yes! But oh so effective at protecting the status quo and sacred political and cultural cows from criticism.
I live in a small town where people are not quite so socially isolated as they are said to be in some cities. Reading this, I was beginning to feel that it was "someone else's problem" until I started reflecting on the fact that when my wife and go to out weekly neighborhood game night to play old-fashioned word games, nearly everyone keeps their phones turned on and out on the table. The conversation often consists either of comments on what has just arrived on their screens and counter-comments illustrated with material instantly searched up on the same screens. What I find odd about this is that everyone at the table considers this normal. And keep in mind that this is not a young crowd, but rather, a bunch of retired boomers.
Sorry, my bad, that is not a comment from Niskanen Center, it is a personal comment from me, Ed Dolan.
Been there, done that.
One idea: A study of how media consumption affects markers of success in life. I understand there's a "chicken and egg" issue, but if parents knew that their kids consumption of media was statistically correlated with college, income. marriage, etc. that might be powerful.
A long-term study of children where one group’s parents are told to keep them away from all digital entertainment and see the effects. It would take a long time and a lot of funding. And the results may show that the children ended up viewing digital entertainment anyway, though they may have a decreased amount of screen time. And people wouldn’t do much with the information even if there was a huge difference in outcomes.
Another interesting essay.
I have a bunch of (random) thoughts.
I am originally from Western New York (I grew up just north of the PA border), and when I was in high school studying American history, I learned that Western New York in the early 1800s was a hotbed of social and cultural agitation. Who knew?! As a result of the Second Great Awakening mentioned by Brink, WNY came to be known as the "Burned-over District" due to the number of religious, political, and social movements that "burned over" WNY. Some examples: near Canandaigua we find the place where Mormons believe that Joseph Smith was led to the golden tables by the Angel Maroni; the hamlet of Lily Dale became a hotbed of Spiritualism, and even to this day, you can go there in summer and have your fortune read; the nationally-famous Chautauqua Institute was founded by Lake Chautauqua; Seneca Falls, where the Seneca Falls Convention took place in 1848; Harriet Tubman eventually settled in Central New York; Frederick Douglass lived and is now buried in Rochester, NY; Scottish/proto-Canadian revolutionary William Lyon McKenzie also settled in Rochester after he was chased out of Canada for fomenting rebellion (in fact, he founded the "Republic of Canada" on Navy Island in the Niagara River, which is currently off-limits due to excavations related to his ill-fated republic; etc.
Although some of these movements/events were religious in nature, most of them were secular, and WNY was considered to have a fervent population, in the words of one of my American history professor. Apparently, a very popular song at this time in WNY was "King Alcohol"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2RpJMJk_5s, composed by the Hutchinson Family Singers, the same group who composed "Lincoln and Liberty Too".
I don't see why many of us cannot be induced to feel that same moral fervor again when it comes to media!
When Brink mentions "like buttons", I'm reminded of the writings of Jonathan Haidt, who claims that the creation of "like buttons" and the sharing of social media content that was enabled on FB and then Twitter between 2010 and 2015 play a significant role in why Americans largely live in two silos and who don't understand the other's language (he has a book coming out on this very topic, "After Babel", in 2024 or 2025, I believe). Bad news often travels faster than good news, and social media has enabled this kind of sharing on a scale unseen until our days.
I work in public education and many of my students express that they are lonely. It's unsurprising that so many of them, even elementary-aged kids, spend so much solitary time playing games, binging YouTube, etc. Many of them lack a solid social/familial foundation, and so when they find themselves alone, they are doubly-alone. This has contributed to a surge in suicidal ideation among young people; in fact, I'm seeing more of it at the elementary level these days than ever before, and we all try to help support our most vulnerable students survive. Safety is the number one job of the school, and only when we are safe can we attend to the education of the children. My secondary colleagues noted that around 2015, many students started fighting with teachers about having to do pair or group work. "I might actually disagree with someone, and I don't want to feel those feelings", I overheard one teen say to my colleague. The pandemic made this much worse for so many, obviously.
As for reading, I encourage my students to read ebooks, audiobooks, print books, etc. I will say that in the decade and a half that I've been doing this work, I've noticed that more and more students are uninterested in chapter books ("too many words") and are instead gravitating to manga and graphic novels. While I don't have anything against those formats per se, one can't help realize that our students are less able to handle any kind of difficult prose. I have a friend who works in one of the most affluent school districts in WNY, and she says that even in that district, the high schools are having to move from Shakespeare in original Modern English to "Shakespeare for Dummies" or some such thing; and that they are striking novels from the curriculum in favor of short stories and verse, as these are much more easily digestible by the students. I don't have the objective data to back up my argument, as that's not my line of work, but anecdotally I can assure you that in the short-term at least, our kids' attention spans and reading levels seem to be decreasing by the year. What that portends for our democratic republic? We only need to look at some of our most well-known politicians of the last decade or so to understand that many lack the ability to critically think.
When Brink says that "the rise of contemporary authoritarian populism here in the United States was the creation of a small group of media entrepreneurs", while I don't disagree with that assertion, I feel that he left out someone who sowed a lot of distrust in government, particularly the federal government: Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who exclaimed that "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem". It was he who helped lay the groundwork for many conservatives' distrust of the federal government by such utterance, and over the course of the '80's until now, we see that same "government is the problem" mentality among many Republican politicians, which is then coupled with the conservative "infotainment" that panders to conservative-leaning citizens. About 3 decades after Reagan, we have Ron Suskind quoting an unnamed source in the Bush Administration that: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do". By "you", he was referring to the "reality-based community" (those of us who believe in a measurable, objective reality), and it's widely believe that Karl Rove was the source of this quote. We then move up to Kellyanne Conway's reference to "alternative facts".
If we lump this all together, we see in the American conservative moment wide swaths of people who not only not distrust, but despise the federal government, and who believe that they can disregard facts that don't comport with their own (many) cognitive biases. So while I don't disagree with Brink that conservative infotainment media is very much to blame for the propagation of this nonsense, I don't think we can leave Ronald Reagan aside when we think about why many on the right came to see the federal government as inherently problematic. I could be mistaken, but I think he was the first president (Republican or otherwise) to articulate such a view, and it certainly has had ramifications on conservative thinking over the decades.
An issue with the media, and I believe it was Neil Postman who pointed this out, is that before the media can inform, it has to entertain. If someone with a boring demeanor sits and stares at you through your tv and reports as much fact-based news as they can, practically nobody will watch it and the media company producing it will shift gears or go bankrupt. People seek entertainment, and while I'm no political scientist, we can simply watch this absurd moment from the 2015 GOP presidential candidate debates (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-2T_9yXIMA) to see that many Americans, particularly of Republican persuasion, love pugilistic and vacuous political theater. Now compare it to a Canadian prime ministerial debate from 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSf2__qpeGA . No bombast, no dramatic music, no incivility. So while this counts as entertainment and information in Canada, it would be a snooze-fest in the US. Unfortunately, US media culture encourages a lot of the bombast and dramatics that we see in both Republican and Democratic debates (although it's in the Republican debates where we see rampant incivility, among other negative traits).
So in short (too late), while I am all in favor of a fervently moral cause of, we have an uphill battle in our current media environment in the US. I look forward to hearing from others what organizations already exist, and/or what ideas they have, relating to how we can help lay the groundwork for such a moral cause.
The big missing piece here seems to be that the temperance movement for alcohol first came out of a widespread and shared set of religious beliefs amongst the populace. If you don't have that, then in my opinion any attempt at temperance is dead in the water.
Why would the average person be willing to put down their phone and avoid the superstimuli of Tiktok, or Netflix? Because intellectuals online argue it's useful? I highly doubt it.
While religious movements have their problems, they do help us simplify issues like this one, where the quick and easy answer individually is actually far worse for society in the long run. Unfortunately until our modern worship of individual freedoms and consumerism is changed, no temperance movement is even close to possible.
Consider the cultural turn against smoking in recent decades--another kind of "temperance" movement with no religious component at all. The risk to physical health--and the risks imposed on third parties through passive smoking--made it easier, I think, for such a purely secular movement to gain traction. But I don't think its impossible that the spike in mental health problems among young people, combined with the widespread recognition that most of us are now addicted to our phones, could motivate a similar cultural turn against unhealthy media consumption.
True, and I conceded in another comment that it is certainly possible.
I am skeptical though as I see the wins against smoking to be more of a Scientism - doctors in white lab coats scolding people about their health as the arbiters of virtue. And the sort of technologist Scientism that rules our society would, to my mind, be difficult to turn against new technology given that new technology is the source of its power.
I think that there is some opportunity for this to happen, I think that at this point a lot of people know someone who they could describe as to obsessed with media, even if the harmful effects are not the same as those from alcohol I think that can serve as a basis for a temperance movement to get some influence
Again, the backlash against alcohol was only possible based on a religious revival, as Brink himself cites. Absent of a true religious movement against technology, how are we going to convince people? Just telling folks it's bad for them isn't enough, especially since so much of culture and business happens online nowadays.
And as you note, people have to be online. It's not optional in today's world.
On the other hand, today, more and more people have quit drinking, eating sugar, spanking children, and smoking cigarettes without a shared religion. We wear seatbelts and use car seats for kids without a shared religion.
Eh, I'd argue that the shared religion is more of a religion of Scientism where doctors wielding faulty scientific studies have taken over the priestly class. The main virtue is health, or at least extension of life.
Anyway, it's definitely possible that apparatus can be used to curtail technology use, although I'm skeptical since the same regime of Scientism requires and exacerbates technological saturation for a number of reasons. Point conceded though.
Modern media, social media in particular, is ruled by the algorithm. The data collected is fed into a black box formula that then picks and chooses the next thing to show up on the feed, all with the goal of keeping the user engaged for a few seconds longer so that their ads generate more revenue.
Social media is now like junk food, loaded with the precise amount of sugar to keep us coming back for more, engineered to satisfy primordial needs of our brain. I don't (yet) have a good solution for this problem at Risk+Progress, other than maybe the suggestion that we ought to regulate the algorithms themselves...not too much, just enough to ensure that users are occasionally fed that which they don't want to see, just enough to break the cycle.
Free speech does not protect algorithmic manipulation. Laws could mitigate these social ills by setting standards and defining actionable fraud, willful deceit, and abuse of power in the algorithmic space. Civil and criminal penalties seem possible. It is at least worth debating.
Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?
It seems to me that the temperance movement had strong institutional support from organized religion, which no longer has much oomph, and from women with time on their hands, which may not be the case now that women are in the labor force.
Who will drive a temperance movement, and won’t people be tempted to “outsource” their moral pressure to government policy, which we know was counterproductive when the temperance movement tried it?
It will only happen within small cult-like communities.
Well said Brink. And, yep, I can tell you were a history major. I will be plugging you in to the adjunct teaching schedule this spring!
I love the connection between the second great awakening and the perfectibility of humans with temperance. A great example of how a cultural ethos can evolve in deep and enduring ways. I'll put in a plug here for my neighbor, Holly Jackson's, book American Radicals (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566131/american-radicals-by-holly-jackson/) which looks at the utopian movements of the mid 1800's inspired by the same fervor.
As for media temperance -- a brilliant idea. But I would argue for an even bigger step: A technology temperance movement. Before we let new technology into our lives, ask ourselves: "Does it spark joy?" Recognize that technology is a scalable, viral, opt-out system. It takes work to say "no." Personal and societal growth, conversely is a slow moving "opt-in" system. It takes work to set personal and human standards and hold ourselves to them. Like temperance, a worthy goal, however frequently we fall short.
Agreed. I wonder what groups out there are already involved in this cause - even if they do not know it - and what collaborations there could be.
"Instead of an Orwellian thought police what we have is more like thought social workers and therapists - a great spider’s web of journalists, scriptwriters, opinionated actors, pop academics and advertising ‘creatives’, alternately flattering you, nagging at you and generally helping you to think correctly. It is a cancerous organism out of the control of anyone - even its own media elite - that brainwashes everyone, politicians included. It ‘keeps you informed’ with ‘The News’ and it entertains you with tv film and drama. It’s not that - in the West anyway - The News is generally a deliberate attempt to tell lies. It’s actually worse than that: the very concept is flawed. Flawed by virtue of editorial selectivity; by virtue of newsroom groupthink; by virtue of a journalistic mindset whereby the dramatic narrative is more important than the actual subject matter and worst of all by the illusion that the consumer of news can really know what is going on all over the world just by looking at your screen." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
The most damaging effects of these powerful media tools actually do derive from deliberate lying, I think.
In my view (and my experience) most people are not that self-aware - they have a kind of defence mechanism that enables them to put a favorable gloss on their own motivations. T.S. Eliot hit the nail on the head: "They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” (I wonder, did you read the essay I linked to my comment?)
Okay, I’ve read your link, which addresses fiction not news media. I understand your point. But deliberate lying by powerful politicians who know better still seems to me more corrosive of trust than any amount of unconscious or conscious bias that leaks into fiction. Good faith matters. So does its lack.
Fair enough. I did not read the essay, but will now.
Western institutions desire to make people "consumers". With fine tuned algorithms and social controls they shape desires, attitudes and appetites and make people captive subjects just as if they were ruled by Totalitarian despots. The path to freedom is for each person to discipline themselves on what they consume and why. For each person to be more skeptical of what they are told to believe and to push back against and challenge "narrative" reporting.
It would also help if America's institutions quit the propaganda game and instead promoted high ideals and principles. You wrote on this in your essay:
"The tragedy of all this finger pointing and desperate virtue signalling is that the authentic voice of Western liberalism – a general goodwill towards all decent fellow human beings and a general dislike of bullies of all stamps – is left no quarter. You either talk the pc talk or you are automatically deemed a bigot whereas it is the pc pieties themselves that are just the latest form of bigotry."
Yes to this: "for each person to discipline themselves on what they consume and why".
(And thanks for flagging the quote from my essay).
As with most claims about digital media, a lot of this could be said about paper, and was. Before computers, I spent most of my work time looking at pieces of paper, and much of my leisure time with my nose stuck in a book (sometimes improving, sometimes escapist tripe).
I agree that revolutions in communications technology always bring major disruptions. The printing press made the Reformation possible, and with it the mass bloodletting of the Wars of Religion. The advent of the novel occasioned a fair amount of moral panic (after the string of suicides provoked by Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, and broader handwringing about ladies filling their heads with romantic mush). But I will stand by my assessment that print cognitive culture is vastly superior to TV and internet cognitive culture. And as to addictiveness, it's common to see a party at a restaurant with everybody lost in their private phone universe; not so common to see a dinner party with everybody's nose in a book.
The amount of stimulation and addictiveness is on another scale.
really nice. i’m surprised there wasn’t more
mention of porn. i think it’s one of the driving undercurrents of the media obsession/compulsion.
Thanks for this. Great article!!
Hopefully there will be an algorithm that will save us from the other algorithms. An operating system with a nanny ai baked in that stops us from viewing addictive media, makes us go to bed, and steers us into pro-social activities like making plans with friends and playing augmented reality games with friends in-person instead of the binging. That’s the only realistic solution I see outside of small cult-like communities of luddites. But still, most will choose an apple, android or windows operating system and will slip into the matrix of 23/7 VR use.
"Decades of such pandering created the contemporary GOP base, totally detached from consensus reality and demanding ever-more lurid political theater."
I marvel at the cognitive dissonance of pundits who so proudly display their bias and ignorance. First, the exploitation of emotions was mastered by the Democratic party. In one of their most notorious 1990s attack ads they had Republican politicians literally causing "granny" to careen over a cliff in her wheelchair. This tactic of casting Republicans as heartless and hateful has been used by Democrats for decades. This has been standard mainstream media bias going back to at least Nixon.
The political genius of Trump was he demolished his GOP opponents by using Democrat political strategies. In particular the strategy of directly attacking and neutering opponents. You know who did this best? Obama. Obama became President in a few short years because he used low tactics to take out first his Senate competition and then his Presidential competition.
Trump coupled the strategy of personal political destruction with a broad outreach of attracting voters by criticizing establishment Republicans for their many failed policies. This was too easy! Why was it so easy? It is because the establishment GOP platform is detached from reality. So too is the establishment DNC platform. Trump could have just as well crashed the DNC but the task was so much easier with the GOP.
Observe that Trump is much more moderate in his political views than is characterized. Observe that for all Trump's barking he was never radical. Compared to the policy changes made now by Biden and previously by Obama, Trump's administration was boring and mainstream. The narrative that Trump was extreme is divorced from reality. And if Trump was extreme, how do we characterize Biden and Obama who utterly destroyed norms of American law and governance?
It is fascinating to watch the media deception take place in real time and for pundits to fall for it. Characters like Trump are media creations. It is the media and professional reporters that focus on Trump's influence and ignore his policies. The media builds up Trump as a king and then feigns insult when Trump behaves like a gluttonous monarch. Professional wrestling has nothing on the fakery that we see in political reporting
If the media focused on actual debate and leadership substance then Trump would be taken down a few notches. But such reporting would threaten almost all political royalty and the media would hate to lose friends in powerful places.
So instead blame the "right wing conspiracy". Deflect responsibility and say the Boogeyman did it. Lazy thinking, yes! But oh so effective at protecting the status quo and sacred political and cultural cows from criticism.
Well, I agree that sloppy thinking is bi-partisan and non-denominational. We should all avoid it.
Ads are not media companies. Obama’s senate competitor was hoisted on his own petard.
The problem is much deeper and close to doing irreversible damage.