This week my TCU Honor’s College Colloquium class which is studying media revolutions attended a lecture by Nicholas Carr, the author of the best-selling book, The Shallows. In his book, Carr reviews neuroscience research and concludes that our intense use of digital media and the Internet is changing the way our brains function. We are becoming less patient, less likely to read complex material, and less able to concentrate for long periods of time.
Listening to Carr brought to mind a conclusion I had reached as a young professor in the mid 1960’s. I was clearly influenced by a media scholar and critic at the University of Toronto named Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was championing a set of ideas around a central concept that “the medium itself is really the message.” I understood this to mean that the primary message of any medium that becomes the one we use most is that it’s mere introduction changes the way everything around it works. And the ultimate psychic and social consequences of these changes make the medium itself more powerful and influential than its content.
I was never sure I fully understood all of what McLuhan was saying, but I remember saying to my students: “If this is not what he meant, then this is what he should have meant!” I was confident from my studies that people growing up in the earlier print dominated world had become more rational and structured in their thinking as a result of using it. The essay style of “beginning, body and conclusion,” with the body containing a list of key points and examples, became the communication norm. And as a result, the way people thought and behaved eventually reflected it.
But after World War II television was to become the dominant medium. It was much more simplistic, emotional, and mesmerizing. It would now make us more emotional, less rational, less patient, and more fragmented. It showered us with bits and pieces of data, and tended to overwhelm and confuse us. It became more difficult to be certain that we knew the whole story about anything. Indeed, television was changing everything still again… the way our brain functioned, our families interacted, how we perceived the world, and even what characteristics our leaders would need to possess in order to be successful.
Now, today, new digital media and the Internet are changing everything all over again. But this time it’s a bit more complicated to analyze. Many of the consequences that worry Carr are indeed a concern. But in addition, websites, blog sites, and social media sites incorporate many different media. While we search for information we trust, we also encounter short video pieces, photos, graphs, links, and lots of print.
So once again, we encounter print and television, but this time they are being re-shaped by new digital driven forces. Video becomes unpolished YouTube-short clips, photos are candid, graphs are simple, links go everywhere, and print becomes much more abbreviated. And so once again a media revolution is changing everything.
But could we choose to control the shape of what we become by taking firm control of what media we use most? Or must we accept what has been the course of media history simply because we can’t help ourselves?
Back in the 1960’s I had parents tell me they were taking their children off television for fear of its corrupting tendencies. But I had to admit that if no one else was doing that they would be taking their children out of the world in which everyone else was now living! So just what is the answer? Maybe its simply knowing when to turn it on, and when to turn if off!
Larry D. Lauer 