In 2020 I read a book I had been ignoring for ten years: “The Shallow Generation: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011 and is very popular with people who seem to hate the internet.
But in 2011 I loved the internet. I am of the generation that is old enough to remember a time before cyberspace, but young enough to have grown up as a digital native. And I loved my new land.
The infinite expanses of information, the people you knew as avatars but for whom you felt like humans, the feeling that there were no limits to what the mind could achieve. My life, my career, and my identity were digital constructs as much as physical. I felt sorry for those who preceded me and lived within the confines of a physical world from which I was among the first to escape.
A decade has passed, and my certainty is gone. Online life just got faster, faster, rougher, louder. “A little bit of everything all the time”, in the words of comedian Bo Burnham. Smartphones took the internet everywhere, colonizing moments I never imagined filling. Many times I’ve walked into a public restroom and seen everyone simultaneously using the urinal and looking at a small screen.
The collective consequences were even worse. The internet had been my escape from the schoolyard, but now it felt like it had turned the whole world into a schoolyard. Watching Donald Trump tweet his way into the presidency felt like some kind of sinister apotheosis. We didn’t want to be bored – and now we never would be.
So when I came across Carr’s book, I was prepared to read it. And what I found was crucial: not just for one theory, but for an entire landscape of 20th-century media theorists—Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman, to name just a few—who foresaw what lay ahead and tried warn.
Carr’s argument began with a remark that sounded familiar:
“The very way my brain works seemed to be changing. It was then that I started to worry about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a few minutes. At first, I thought the problem was a symptom of mental sock deterioration. But I realized that my brain wasn’t just drifting.
I was famished. He was demanding to be fed like the internet fed him – and the more he was fed, the hungrier he got. Even when I wasn’t at my computer, I yearned to check emails, click on links, Google something. I wanted to be connected.”
Hungry. That was the word that hooked me. It was what my brain looked like too. In need. Restless. There was a time when he wanted information. But then he began to want distraction. And after that, with social media, validation. A constant beat of the same thing: you exist, you are seen.
Carr’s research led him to the work of McLuhan, which lives on today in reruns of “Groom Bride, Bride Nervous” and his aphoristic maxim “the medium is the message.” That saying never really convinced me. It was another McLuhan quote, taken from his 1964 classic “The Media as an Extension of Man,” that struck a chord: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it’s how they’re used that counts, is the numb posture of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a media is like the hunk of succulent meat taken by the thief to distract the watchdog of the mind”.
We were told – and taught – that the media are neutral and that content is king. You can’t say anything about “television”. What matters is whether you watch “Kardashians” or “The Sopranos”, “Sesame Street” or “Paw Patrol”. Saying you read “books” is meaningless: do you devour lurid, flashy novels or history books from 18th century Europe? Twitter is nothing more than the city’s new central square; If your feed is a hellish landscape filled with outrage and infighting, it’s up to you to control your experience better.
There is some truth to that, of course. But there is less truth to this idea than to its opposite. McLuhan’s view is that media matter more than content; which are the common rules that govern all creation and consumption in a media that transform people and society. Oral culture teaches us to think one way, written culture another. Television has turned everything into entertainment, and social media has taught us to think with the crowd.
McLuhan’s arguments were taken forward by Postman. The latter was more moralistic than McLuhan; he was more likely to regret the course taken by society than to map it objectively. But he watched the maturation of tendencies that McLuhan had only envisioned. As Sean Illing, co-author of “The Paradox of Democracy” told me, McLuhan says: don’t just look at what is being expressed; look at the media in which it is being expressed. And so Postman says: don’t just look at how things are being expressed – look at how the things being expressed determine what is actually expressible.” In other words: the medium blocks certain messages.
In his prophetic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued that the dystopia we should fear is not the totalitarianism of George Orwell’s “1984” but the drugged drowsiness of “Brave World.” New” by Aldous Huxley. TV teaches us to expect that anything and everything should be fun. But not everything should be entertainment, and the expectation that it should be is a huge social and even ideological shift. Postman is keen to distance himself from critics who bemoan the so-called “junk television.”
“I have no objection to garbage on television. The best things on television are its garbage, and no one or anything is seriously threatened by it. Furthermore, we measure a culture not by its production of stated trivialities, but by what it declares to be significant. Our problem is precisely that, because TV is more trivial, and therefore more dangerous, when its aspirations are high, when it portrays itself as the bearer of important cultural discussions. The irony here is that this is what intellectuals and critics constantly urge television to do. The problem with these people is that they don’t take television seriously enough.”
That’s why Postman found not sitcoms but news programs troubling. Television, he writes, “does us the greatest disservice when it co-opts serious modes of discourse—journalism, politics, science, education, commerce, religion—and converts them into entertainment packages. We would all be better served if television got worse, not better.”
All of this sounds a bit like a manifestation of bad temper or eccentricity. However, Postman took a stand here: the boundary between entertainment and everything else was blurring, and with that only entertainment artists could live up to the expectations we had of politicians. He spends considerable time reflecting, for example, on people who were viable politicians in an age of text but who would be excluded from politics for not commanding screen attention.
This process began in Postman’s time, with Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, but it has fully blossomed in ours, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and, of course, Donald Trump. As alarmed as Postman was, nothing in his book comes close to the sheer bizarreness of the world we live in today.
Reality TV is an almost all-too-exact example of entertainment that consumes everything else: an entire genre in which what seduces comes from the pretense of reality, in which the word “reality” does nothing more than indicate another kind of fiction.
In the last ten years the narrative has turned against Silicon Valley. Glorious reporting gave way to defamatory criticism, and the visionaries who invent our future came to be characterized as Machiavellian figures who undermine the foundations of our present.
My frustration with these narratives, both then and now, is that they focus on people and companies, not technologies. I suspect this is because American culture is still deeply uncomfortable with criticism of technology. There is something that is almost an immune system that protects us against this: you are called a Luddite, an alarmist.
“In this sense, all Americans are Marxists,” Postman wrote, “because we strongly believe that history leads us toward some foreordained paradise and that technology is the force behind this movement.”
I think this is true, but it coexists with an opposite truth: Americans are capitalists and we strongly believe that if a choice is made freely, it guarantees you the presumption of being immune from criticism. This is one reason why it is difficult to talk about how we are transformed by the media we use. This conversation requires value judgments, on some level.
I was thinking about this recently when I heard Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has been collecting data on how digital media harms teenagers, said bluntly. “People talk about how to modify social platforms – let’s hide the ‘like’ buttons, for example. Well, Instagram has tried – but I’ll say it very clearly: there is no way, trick or architectural change that will make it ok that teenage girls going through puberty post pictures of them for public review by strangers or others.”
What caught my attention in Haidt’s comment is how rarely I hear any argument structured in this way. He argues three things. First, that the way Instagram works is changing how teens think. You are reinforcing to the extreme their need for approval of how they look, what they say, and what they do, making that approval both always available and eternally insufficient.
Second, it’s the platform’s fault — it’s an intrinsic characteristic of the way Instagram is designed, not just how it’s used. And third, this is bad. Although many people use Instagram, take pleasure in it, and walk through the Polish corridor unscathed, it’s still bad. We should not want our children to be molded in this way.
Or take up Twitter. Twitter, as a medium, is pushing its users little by little towards ideas that can survive without context, that can travel legibly in less than 280 characters. It encourages a constant awareness of what everyone else is discussing. It converts the criterion by which the success of a conversation is measured not in the reaction and response of others, but in the volume of reactions.
He too is a form. And it has had a special impact on some of our most powerful industries: media, politics and technology. These are industries that I know well, and I believe that Twitter has not changed them for the better, nor has it changed the people who work in them (including myself) for the better.
This is anything but an argument against technology, were it even coherent. It’s an argument in favor of taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken; to recognize that, as MacLuhan’s friend and colleague John Culkin said, “we shape our tools, and from that, they shape us.”
There is an optimism in it, as it reminds us that we have free will. And there are questions asked, questions that we should devote much more time and energy to trying to answer: how do we want to be shaped? Who do we want to become?
