Pay attention, please!
I first discovered the work of educator and cultural critic Neil Postman by way of TV presenter Chris Hayes' book The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. The subject of that book has long held my own attention because of my concerns at how, in the age of smartphones and social media, our attention generally is being captured, extracted and commodified by the technology. As Hayes states in the book: "In ways large and small, we are seeing the erosion of the last vestiges of a functional attention regime". Hayes draws on the work of Postman extensively, setting out Postman's own views on the issue:
"The incentives of the attention age have created a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary. This transformation has been a long time in the making. Before the digital age there was the TV age. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, Neil Postman argued that, for its first 150 years, the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium - books, pamphlets, newspapers, sermons - structured not only public discourse, but the institutions of democracy itself. TV destroyed all that, Postman argued, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was literally meaningless. 'Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,' he wrote. 'They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.'"
If that's what Postman thought of TV, we can only wonder what he would have made of social media if he'd lived to see it (he died in 2003). Hayes continues: "Postman first settled on his argument while working on an essay about two different dystopian visions of the future that had been offered in the mid-20th century: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. Postman's insight was that these two books, though often grouped together, portray very different dystopias. In Orwell's vision, all information is tightly controlled by the state, and people have access only to the narrow, bludgeoning propaganda that is force-fed to them. Huxley's vision was the opposite. In Brave New World, the problem isn't too little information but too much, or at least too much entertainment and distraction. "What Orwell feared," Postman writes, "were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism." The key insight of Postman's now-classic work is that Huxley described the future much better than Orwell."
I've long thought this myself. I vividly remember the day, a dozen or so short years ago, when I first saw someone walking along the street totally engrossed in their phone - to the point where they seemed oblivious to everything else that was going on around them. It made me laugh at the time - the daftness of the spectacle. Nowadays, of course, it's unusual to see anyone not interacting with their phone in some way. Their lives are focused on it: their contacts, their banking and payments methods, their bookings, their navigation, their communication, their home heating and security controls... and soon their driving licences and maybe their passports. One way of looking at it is to think "Great! So much convenience! So much control at our fingertips!" The danger is that we become so enamoured of these benefits that we fail to notice or even think about the downsides - quite apart from hacking, ransomware, identity theft, hybrid warfare and so on. The problems created by social media are already known about: addiction, distraction, grooming, doom-scrolling, loss of privacy, 'influencer' culture, polarisation, mental illness, misinformation, disinformation, etc. Teachers are already reporting, too, that higher numbers of children are starting school with no idea how to use a book (page-turning instead of swiping), and imaginative/creative play is in decline. And all that's before we get on to what AI is bringing down the cables...
All of this represents, in my opinion, the ultimate achievement of capitalism (they're getting paid every time we freely scroll - hence the Silicon Valley maxim: 'If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product.') And it's arguably the most successful (drastic?) experiment in social engineering ever conducted. And it's happened so quickly and at such an enormous scale that we haven't had anything like enough time to adapt to it and properly assimilate it into our culture and behaviour (95% of 18+ adults in the UK alone now has a smartphone and 90% of the 13+ global population in developed countries has a social media account. Source: Ofcom.)
If anyone is equally interested/concerned about these issues, this hour-long discussion is well worth the time to watch. In it, Tristan Harris (maker of the documentary The Social Dilemma and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology) uses Postman's work and insights as the basis for an examination of where we're at with the tech. He is joined by writer/academics Sean Illing and Professor Lance Strate (a former student of Postman). In spite of the ominous-sounding title, it's wide-ranging and looks for solutions and ways forward. There's a chilling note towards the end, though, when they speculate about the demise of reading specifically and literacy more generally - the foundations of both democracy and of independent thought - as we allow machines more and more to do our reading, writing and thinking for us.
Regulation, they agree, is the key. Timely, considering the UK government's current deliberations over the Online Safety Act (and the zealous aversion to such regulation by the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg - the richest two individuals on earth).
The Man Who Predicted the Downfall of Thinking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPr9h-yb1rU(link is external)