Jeff Einstein's Blog
June 10, 2014
A Brief History of Digital: The Untold Story…
Here’s a Brief History of Digital, excerpted from The Media Addict’s Handbook…
Popular culture by definition cannot tolerate critical self-examination. It simply cannot pause to turn the spotlight inward, nor can it spare the requisite time to fashion any meaningful historical narrative. Like a shark in the water, popular culture must always keep moving forward or die. Thus is history in the Great Age of Mediation rendered essentially stillborn and inert – at best a quiet and reflective respite from the clamor of the present.
That said, I feel a personal obligation to set the record straight and to provide an explanation for how we suddenly woke up one day to find ourselves so firmly ensconced in the Great Age of Mediation. As is often the case, however, the truth bears little resemblance to popular myth and legend. Though brief, what follows below is wholly unabridged and completely factual…
The 1980s
It may seem hard to believe these days – especially when our personal lives are so crammed with so many digital devices – but the digital revolution didn’t begin at home. It didn’t begin at home simply because there was no functional or otherwise compelling reason for consumers to buy personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so the home market fizzled out soon enough and didn’t re-emerge in strength until the mid-1990s with the rise of the Internet. Instead, the digital revolution began in the office where applications for PCs were patently obvious, and it came of age not with the introduction of the personal computer as a consumer product in the late 1970s and early 80s, but with the adoption, maturation and utter ubiquity of the electronic spreadsheet as the dominant corporate tool just a few years later. The sudden ability to project and manipulate corporate numbers with a facility and scale previously impossible and unimagined delivered immense power to the captains of industry and finance and gave rise to a high-tech Wall Street culture whose influence and dominance continues to grow virtually unabated in direct relationship to the power and ubiquity of the chips and devices that power it.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
– Marshall McLuhan
The sudden flurry of M&A activity, the Black Monday stock market crash of October 1987, and the collapse of the savings and loan industry later in the same decade were all early manifestations of an overly enthusiastic corporate rush to adopt and deploy a digital tool whose inherent power and sudden ability to project immense scale far surpassed our limited ability to mitigate and moderate any associated risk.
Meanwhile, the introduction of cable TV in the early 1980s fragmented urban audiences and forever changed the commercial media landscape. In lieu of the ability to reach mass audiences like their established broadcast counterparts, the fledgling cable networks sold the ability to target their audiences much more efficiently instead. Suddenly, agency media planners and buyers were besieged by armies of cable network sales reps, all of whom extolled the virtues of effective targeting based on extensive data-driven audience research. The working vernacular of advertising and marketing began to change accordingly as the primary industry focus, infrastructure and billing mechanisms shifted away from creative execution and moved towards media, a tool-driven migration made possible and powered by the wholesale adoption and application of the electronic spreadsheet. The sheer number-crunching power, appeal and corporate ubiquity of the electronic spreadsheet all but guaranteed the corresponding migration of agency resources from the message to the medium and – true to the sage observation of pioneer media ecologist Marshall McLuhan – the medium indeed became the message.
Still, someone had to sell the surging Wall Street and high-tech cultures (not to mention all the digital hardware and software that rode shotgun with them) to Main Street America. Enter the production-line template for the post-modern MBA, a thoroughly digital technocrat formally trained in both marketing and financial disciplines. It’s no mistake that the equally rapid ascents of the Wall Street and digital media cultures coincided, as both were driven by graduates of the same MBA programs of the same schools, and both were favored stepchildren of the exact same tool: the electronic spreadsheet – without a doubt the most powerful, persuasive and thoroughly abused technology of all time.
The 1990s
The explosive evangelism of the World Wide Web as a commercial medium and the financial promiscuity of the brief dot com era that rode shotgun with it were entirely consistent with the characteristics of a media-driven youth movement, not unlike the one that spread rock and roll and free love around the world via commercial radio and TV in the 1960s. During the six years between 1995 and 2000, legions of youthful MBAs – most with little or no actual hands-on experience in marketing and advertising – assumed complete control over what would soon become history’s most potent and powerful medium.
Despite the counterculture hype, these were hardly the rogue advertising madmen of yesteryear. And they weren’t equipped with mere slogans and taglines. These were highly motivated, highly educated and highly financed young MBAs equipped with the most powerful business tools ever devised, tools powerful enough to eclipse even the hard-driving ambitions of those who deployed them. The young dot com evangelists were the 1990s versions of the highly motivated, highly educated and highly financed young physicists and scientists who gathered in Los Alamos during World War II to build the first atomic bomb. This generation, however, wasn’t hired and funded by a wartime government and didn’t crunch their numbers with slide rules, chalkboards and mechanical calculators. This generation was hired and funded instead by huge technology companies and rapacious venture capitalists, and their calculations were powered by a billion microchips. And just as the young physicists and scientists of Los Alamos ushered in the Nuclear Age, the young technologists and MBAs of the Silicon Valley in California and the Silicon Alley in New York City ushered in the Great Age of Mediation.
Safe to say that neither generation was particularly inclined to ponder the long-term consequences of their respective efforts and technologies, as youth on a mission rarely are. Hence, the young Turks of the dot com era didn’t think twice about what might happen to our lives and our lifestyles as they engineered and fast-tracked the migration of immensely powerful digital office productivity tools – like laptops, PDAs and mobile phones – from the office into our homes. No one pondered what might happen once most of the functional distinctions between the office and the home were obliterated, or what might ensue as the pace of our private lives accelerated to match the speed of our own office technologies. No one paused to consider how the promise of immense digital scale might soon all but eliminate institutional accountability and erode the public trust, nor were there any Surgeon General warnings affixed to any of the digital devices we slipped in and out of our pockets and purses dozens of times each day like packs of cigarettes…
WARNING: This device is exceptionally addictive. It was not designed to improve the quality of your life. It was designed specifically and explicitly to increase productivity. Its use will guarantee profound unintended consequences – some of them not so good.
Of course, no one thought the dot com boom would ever end, either. At least not until it came crashing down in the spring of 1999. But by then the damage was done: commercial media poured unabated through the digital pipeline and flooded absolutely everything. By the end of the dot com era our lives had been vastly accelerated and forever changed – not necessarily for the better.
The 2000s
While high-tech investments in the mid-to-late 1990s focused primarily on building out the essential commercial architecture and infrastructure of the Internet, the first decade of the 21st century was mostly about three things:
1. The consolidation of power. The first decade of the 21st century was one of immense mergers and acquisitions among already enormous media franchises, especially online. In addition, huge amounts of investment capital were put to work on commercial technologies that would a) rapidly expand and set the stage for broadband access and b) track, analyze and optimize consumer behavioral data online. Sure enough, broadband access soon became the de facto standard while the digital advertising and marketing industry – in response to legitimate consumer concerns about the volume and integrity of the behavioral data tracked, analyzed and optimized – solemnly promised on a stack of shrink-wrapped user manuals to regulate itself, and embarked on a mission to educate consumers not to worry so much about potential abuses of personal data. Your data, they promised, are safe, and the fact that we track, analyze, parse and sell them to anyone who asks is merely the price you pay for a far better and far more efficient online experience. “Trust us,” they said.
Of course, soon after 9/11 government security and intelligence agencies were granted broad powers by Congress and executive order to deploy the same basic digital tracking technologies in the war against terrorism with the same basic refrain: Your data are safe, and the fact that we track, analyze, parse and share them is the price you pay for a secure homeland. “Trust us,” they said. Meanwhile, the government directive to the commercial high-tech and media industries was likewise simple and to the point: “We now have the legal right and legitimate excuse to subpoena and examine your customer data pretty much whenever we want. So let’s do lunch and partner up.”
Thus we were taught by industry and government agents alike not to worry about all of the digital tracking and spying technologies we couldn’t see at work behind the scenes. “Pay no attention,” they told us, “to the man behind the curtain.”
Meanwhile, those who stood the most to gain by selling digital technologies and media to everyone on the planet evangelized the liberating, lifestyle-enhancing and presumed democratizing effects of their products and services, and proclaimed the entire world on-demand and at our fingertips. True enough, perhaps, but behind the scenes the real byproducts of so much digital power in the hands of so many huge institutions were…
a) corporatist collusion of private and government interests on a massive scale,
b) the equally massive expansion of immensely amplified institutional power along with
c) the rise of unmanageable complexity and the virtual end of institutional accountability.
The medium was the message and the true message of digital media was buried far beneath the graphic user interfaces that whisked us like magic from one virtual reality to another. The medium was the message and the true message of digital media was far less about the democratization of media as advertised and far more about the consolidation, expansion and unaccountability of institutional power.
2. Online and on-demand video and HDTV. By 2005 high-speed Internet access was already the rule rather than the exception, and what hadn’t yet been obvious to some soon became obvious to everyone: a) that broadband Internet access was in fact all about the distribution and consumption of video on demand, and b) that video on demand – especially HDTV – was by far the most powerful and influential drug in history. No surprise therefore that by the end of the 21st century’s first decade, virtually every digital device on the planet came equipped with an HDTV screen, more than half of all Internet bandwidth was devoted to uploading, downloading and streaming on-demand video, and HDTV was the broadcast standard mandated by governments worldwide.
3. Mobile. The introduction of the smartphone liberated on-demand video and all but completed our enslavement as media addicts. We now had access to our favorite and most reliable media narcotics 24/7 – sitting, standing or flat on our backs – whenever we wanted, wherever we went.
Of course no brief history of the 21st century’s first decade would be complete without mention of the great housing collapse and market crash of 2007 and 2008 – the third and fourth major market crashes to occur in the debut generation of the electronic spreadsheet. Rather than explore our own complicity in the tool-driven nature of each financial debacle, however, we conveniently added three zeros to the national dialog and debt after each crash, crunched the new numbers and partied on – all of which seemed a pretty livable arrangement until late 2008, when we suddenly ran out of zeros because no one knew what to call a thousand trillions…
April 26, 2014
Goodbye Philip, Hello Aldous…
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” – Aldous Huxley
Now in the wake of the still-receding media storm generated by the recent loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman to heroin addiction, I offer the following top-line statistics to help steer the inevitable media feeding frenzy over the next celebrity OD in a more meaningful direction…
The DEA attributes 3,038 Americans deaths in 2010 to heroin overdose, just under one half of one percent of the estimated 700,000 heroin addicts nationwide, and about 8% of the nation’s annual death toll by drug overdose (excluding alcohol).
A Google search for “Philip Seymour Hoffman + heroin” generates 67,700,000 result links.
On average, there are about 2.75 people per American household.
On average, there are about 2.93 TVs per American household.
On average, there are about 5.7 Internet-connected devices per American household.
More smartphones are sold and activated each day than there are babies born worldwide (about 300,000).
By 2015 the average American will consume 15.5 aggregate hours of electronic media consumption per day, the equivalent of 9 out of every 10 waking minutes.
That last statistic comes from a recent study by the USC Marshall School of Business, and the conclusion it leaves us with is undeniable: our addiction to all things media and all things digital dwarfs all other addictions to all other narcotics combined in all meaningful ways. If you own a smartphone in 21st-century America, the odds are overwhelming that you also own a bona fide dependency problem. Functionally, our addiction to all things media and all things digital invokes the exact same dopamine release-and-response mechanism in our brains as any other addiction to any other narcotic or addictive behavior. Functionally, our addiction to all things media and all things digital rewires our brains over time in the exact same fashion as all other addictions to all other narcotics and addictive behaviors. And like all other addictions to other narcotics, our addiction to all things media and all things digital starts out innocently enough but eventually turns against us. Eventually it turns against us to steal our time and money and freedom.
Clearly, much of Huxley’s dystopian vision is unfolding right before our eyes. The only surprise is that the operative pharmacological agents he warned against aren’t delivered in pill or other physical form. Rather, they’re delivered in bits and bytes. And we don’t call them heroin or crystal meth or crack; we call them media, and our irrefutable addiction to them has emerged over the past generation as the default condition of American life, the rule rather than the exception. We search for, find and ingest media everywhere we go. Our kids are hooked on media before they enter pre-school, and our lives are shaped and defined by them at every stage and in every possible way. We are, per the prescient title of media ecologist Neil Postman’s seminal title, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and we are born like crack babies into a Brave New Digital World where none us of will soon be able to find or fashion context or meaning for our lives beyond the High-Definition bits and bytes we consume virtually nonstop through all our digital devices.
Oblivious to and utterly complicit in our own patently obvious dependencies, we turn time and again to the biggest dealers on the block for advice and counsel about addiction – and everything else. And like all drug dealers, the global media and digital technology cartels – whose size and influence make the drug cartels of Mexico and Columbia look like rank beginners – are more than happy to comply. They inundate us with tens of thousands of highly credentialed financial, health and lifestyle management experts across millions of channels, websites, blogs and mobile apps, 24/7. They ask and answer every possible question, then tell us to stay tuned for more. Yet somehow – despite all the experts and all their sage and indispensable advice – we are poorer, fatter, sicker and far more anxious and fearful of everything in our lives than we were a mere generation ago, before our digital media addiction assumed control of our lives as moderator over all our most important internal and external debates. Like all other late-stage addictions, our digital media addiction sits over us like a feudal lord and rules with an iron fist.
Make no mistake, all technologies and media are Faustian bargains. Each new technology and each new medium generates winners and losers, and each comes with a price tag. If we choose to look, we will see the real price tags of our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital emerging all around us. The same digital tools and media that once amassed immense wealth and produced millions of jobs now turn against us as net destroyers of jobs and the middle class. The same digital tools and media that promised to improve healthcare, bring costs down and create more transparency have produced the exact opposite: an increasingly expensive and opaque bureaucracy driven by immense corporate and government intermediaries. The same digital tools and media that were deployed after 9/11 to protect our security now steal our privacy and trust and civil liberties. True enough, freedom of consumer choice exploded as advertisers and marketers raced to fill the digital pipeline in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but freedom of consumer choice is an ersatz freedom offered by a false god. Real freedom is the freedom not to choose, the freedom not to participate. And the freedom not to participate is the first freedom stolen by our addictions, regardless of the narcotic.
Once our addictions take over as moderators and arbiters of our life narratives they begin to bend our perceptions of reality to suit their own agendas – precisely what happened in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s demise when our massive addiction to all things media and all things digital did what it always does in the wake of any celebrity overdose: steer the media debate to yet another expert-driven discussion of heroin or crystal meth or cocaine or prescription drugs. The truth, however, is that addiction is not about heroin and not about crystal meth and not about cocaine and not about prescription drugs, just as it’s not about HDTV and not about laptops and not about tablets or smartphones. All of these things are mere drugs of choice, and addiction is not about drugs. Addiction is about behavior, and all addicted behaviors are pretty much the same, regardless of the narcotic. Heroin addicts behave pretty much like compulsive gamblers who behave pretty much like cocaine addicts who behave pretty much like sex addicts who behave pretty much like alcoholics who behave pretty much like food addicts who behave pretty much like meth addicts who behave pretty much like media addicts. As addicts we typically underestimate the narcotic power of our addictions just as we typically overestimate our ability to beat them. Heroin, cocaine, alcohol, food, sex or media, in the end we surrender our time and money and freedom to our addictions, regardless of the narcotic.
Addiction is an extreme state by definition, but no one can see the extreme forest for the trees when everyone is addicted to the same narcotic, as Huxley so boldly predicted in Brave New World – a society whose citizens are all addicted by state mandate to soma and sex but can’t see or fathom their own enslavement because everyone is addicted to the same narcotics. The real threat to liberty and freedom in Huxley’s imagined world and our very real world come not from the things we hate and fear but from the things we love and invite into our lives. We consume electronic media almost every waking minute of every waking day, and we think it’s normal because everyone around us is behaving the same way…but it’s not. It’s a form of mass psychosis invoked by the constant and relentless release of media-induced dopamine in all of our brains almost all of the time. And when addiction becomes the societal status quo, the rule rather than the exception, our lives and homes and businesses and communities begin to buckle under the strain. The undisclosed truth (and the dirty secret that the major media cartels won’t discuss) is that we can no longer afford to pay the spiritual, social, emotional and physical price tags for our default addiction to all things media and all things digital. Those who would Occupy Wall Street need look no further than their own iPhones and the cash reserves of Apple and Google and Yahoo and Facebook and Microsoft and Disney and Comcast and Time Warner and Verizon and AT&T and Nintendo and Electronic Arts to explain the accelerated polarization of wealth and the destruction of the middle class in 21st-century America. Follow the money and it will lead you directly from your own smartphone, tablet, laptop and HDTV to the balance sheets of the biggest digital and media dealers (and their paid proxies at all levels of government), those most enriched and empowered by our default addiction to digital media.
Meanwhile our addiction tells us in no uncertain terms that the answers to all our problems can only be found in the consumption of still more media and still more digital devices. It draws upon the institutionalized sales language and imagery of personal empowerment and freedom to enslave us further. Indeed, we love to attribute events like the Arab Spring and other popular liberation uprisings to the rise and proliferation of social media. But personal empowerment and the digital democratization of media are largely the mythic golems of digital marketers and professional spinmeisters with billion-dollar budgets. The same digital and social media tools that we love to describe as liberating forces have already been co-opted by powerful corporatist agendas with big budgets and little tolerance (beyond that expressed in their own advertising, marketing and PR) for the feel-good platitudes and slogans of media-driven and induced pop culture. No, the true bias of digital media is neither personal empowerment nor freedom. The true bias of digital media is the consolidation of power and wealth among those who already have power and wealth. The real bias of digital media benefits most those commercial and government institutions that manage and manipulate terabytes of data each and every day. Witness the fact that the financial institutions deemed too big to fail back in 2008 are – for the most part – twice the size and only half as accountable in 2014.
Like all addictions, our addiction to all things media and all things digital generates two primary byproducts: complexity and inertia. The accelerated complexity of our lifestyles since the mid-1990s is everywhere obvious and self-evident. Inertia, however, is all but invisible and far more insidious, and explains why addiction is so very tough to beat. Old habits and new addictions die hard for a reason: massive complexity begets impenetrable inertia, both institutional and personal. Together they inhibit innovation, erode the soul and suppress or kill any corresponding will to challenge the status quo — precisely why busting through the clutter these days requires either a very big budget or a very big bang. The overwhelming complexity and inertia we see at work in the government institutions and industries that manage almost every facet of our lives is very much symptomatic of our late-stage addiction to all things media and all things digital in the early 21st century. All good intentions aside, executive fiat and media-borne demagoguery become the tools of choice to rally popular sentiment and compel cosmetic change that looks and sounds good on the surface by design but can’t and won’t actually challenge the status quo. Personal freedoms and civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency and profit, and Fascism — the religion of the state — is typically not very far behind…
In the end – per Huxley’s vision – we are likely undone less by the things we fear or despise and more by the things we love. Yet the answers we seek will not be found in more media or more powerful smartphones, contrary to the self-serving pundits of all stripes who claim otherwise. In this great age of addicted excess the answers we seek cannot be found in more of anything except wisdom and common sense, perhaps because the quality of life in 21st-century America is no longer a function of more. Wisdom and common sense suggest that the quality of life in 21st-century America is a function of subtraction and moderation, neither of which are found anywhere in the DNA of our popular culture, and certainly not in our default addiction to digital media. And there’s the rub: No one ever got rich by selling less – especially less media or less digital technology.
As a nation we can no longer afford to wait for solutions from corporate and government masters with no incentive whatsoever to change the status quo. Skepticism is our first obligation to ourselves and our children, and we must stop looking to the biggest dealers for answers to our own addictions. So in the spirit of freedom and independence, I offer the following common-sense suggestions to help improve the quality of your life right away:
Designate your dining room and bedroom as smartphone-free zones.
Never split your attention between two or more screens. Limit your digital media interaction to one screen at a time. Contrary to popular folklore, we’re simply not equipped to multitask – at least not very well.
Never desecrate the sanctity of your church, synagogue or mosque with your smartphone. Leave it at home. Meaningful ritual is the sworn enemy of all addiction.
Never desecrate the sanctity of nature with your smartphone, tablet or laptop. Leave them at home or in the hotel. If you need to take photos, take a real camera.
Always wait at least one hour before you check your email in the morning. Doing so will help you start the day on your own terms instead of reacting to the agendas of everyone whose email just happens to be in your inbox.
Use your break time at work to go someplace quiet – away from all digital distractions – to think quiet thoughts or talk with a good friend or read a book, and leave your smartphone at your desk when you step out to lunch.
Don’t expect your kids to moderate their digital media use if you won’t moderate yours. They don’t care what you say. They only care what you do, and their addictions are reinforced by yours.
Perhaps the revolution referenced by Aldous Huxley in the opening quote to this piece speaks less to the inevitable consolidation and victory of corporatist power over individual will and liberty and more to the fulfillment of our chemical destiny as a species wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain at a time in our technological evolution when the supply of affordable narcotics is suddenly universal and utterly relentless. Maybe Darwin had it right, only backwards: Instead of evolving from apes, maybe we’re evolving into apes. Maybe with a little luck we’ll all wind up high atop the jungle canopy with a great view and a fruit platter.
I conclude with an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s Choruses From the Rock:
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
Goodbye Philip. Hello Aldous…
February 18, 2014
Re Philip Seymour Hoffman
In light of the tragic death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and all of the attention that drug addiction is getting these days as a result, I thought I’d share some statistics. I don’t mean to trivialize the obvious power of licit and illicit narcotics alike, but let’s be clear on the scope…
There are an estimated 700,000 heroin addicts nationwide (representing a mere two-tenths of 1% of the population).
The average American household has more TV sets (2.93) than people.
The average American household now has 5.7 Internet-connected devices (including smartphones).
More smartphones are sold and activated each day than there are babies born worldwide (about 300,000).
By 2015 the average American will consume 15.5 hours of electronic media per day (approximately 97% of all waking time, calculated at 16 hours per day).
Now consider the sage words of Aldous Huxley…
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
Clearly, Huxley’s fear has come to pass. The only surprise is that the pharmacological mind-killer is not delivered in pill form. Rather, it’s delivered in bits and bytes and self-created by the chemistry set of our own brains. It’s called media addiction, and it has emerged over the past generation as the default condition of American life, the rule rather than the exception. We are, per the prescient title of media ecologist Neil Postman’s seminal title, Amusing Ourselves to Death…
December 5, 2013
Drunk on Digital Kool-Aid: An Interview with Digital Media Pioneer Jeff Einstein
Here’s the link to the interview with yours truly on ShellyPalmer.com. And here’s the interview…
Digital media pioneer Jeff Einstein started writing about media as addiction in 2004. Back then, he observed how our fealties and addictions to the media and digital devices in our lives had already begun to turn against us, like an addiction to any other narcotic. Of course, back then almost everyone thought he was crazy. Today, however, media as addiction is a common topic of discussion on just about every TV and radio talk show – from Bill Moyers to The View. Alarmingly, what Jeff predicted ten years ago has unfolded just as he predicted. So when I heard about his new title, The Media Addict’s Handbook, I called him on the phone to talk about it.
* * * * *
JAFFER: What distinguishes The Media Addict’s Handbook and your views in general from those of other thinkers and writers, who in the past year or two have started to sound the alarm about our relationships with media and digital technology? I’m talking about folks like Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier, Sheri Turkle, Heidi Boghosian and Nicholas Taleb.
JEFF: Well, with the possible exception of Nicholas Taleb, the others you mentioned have pretty much circumscribed their views and thoughts to our relationships with the digital technologies in our lives. My thinking, however, is much more systemic. To me, the technologies themselves are of far less concern than the threat posed by our super-addiction to them. To me, the medium is the real message, and the real medium is no longer the technology. The real medium is a super-addiction that now sits as moderator over all our most critical personal and societal debates. The specific technologies and media merely represent our individual drugs of choice.
JAFFER: So you view social media and short-format videos and video games and email and texting and laptops and smartphones and HDTVs and game consoles as individual drugs, component parts of a much larger default addiction.
JEFF: Yes, exactly. But addiction is never about the specific narcotic. Addiction is about the behavior, and addicted behavior is pretty much the same, regardless of the narcotic. Sex addicts behave just like video game addicts who behave just like marijuana addicts who behave just like social media addicts who behave just like compulsive gamblers who behave just like HDTV addicts who behave just like cocaine addicts. Add them all together and we realize that addiction is now the default condition of America life, the rule rather than the exception. Almost everyone with a smartphone is an addict and behaves accordingly.
JAFFER: But why has it taken so long for the rest of society to wake up to your media-as-addiction message?
JEFF: Because everyone else around us is addicted to all things media and all things digital also, and we simply can’t see the forest for the trees. Because our addictions are fun and entertaining and comforting at first. Because we’re wired to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. And because we have an innate tendency to deny the addictive power of our narcotics while we exaggerate our ability to resist them. The quid pro quo with all addiction is essentially the same now as it was five thousand years ago in the cradle of civilization: reliable diversion and escape and succor in exchange for our time and money and freedom. The drugs, however, are a lot more powerful and a lot more plentiful.
JAFFER: Really? You think the drugs today are more addictive?
JEFF: Oh, without a doubt. HDTV is history’s most perfect narcotic. It’s not for nothing that every digital device sold on the planet comes with an LCD.
JAFFER: In The Media Addict’s Handbook you write that our systems have started to turn against us. What do you mean by that?
JEFF: All systems pushed to extreme begin to exert an opposite effect. They begin to operate in reverse.
JAFFER: One of Marshall McLuhan’s Four Laws.
JEFF: Yes. Addiction is a perfect example of what happens when a system is pushed to extreme. At first, we get pleasure and succor from our drugs of choice. Sometimes, however, they begin to turn again us. And sometimes they take over our lives and enslave us — exactly what’s happened to us on a massive scale in our individual and societal relationships with all things media and all things digital.
JAFFER: Can you give me some examples?
JEFF: Sure. The same digital tools of scale designed to enhance productivity and save time now divert our attention endlessly and consume all of our time. The same digital tools of scale that once amassed immense wealth and produced millions of jobs now turn against us as a net destroyer of wealth and jobs. The same digital tools of scale that promised to bring healthcare costs down and create more transparency have produced the exact opposite effect. The same digital tools of scale that were deployed after 9/11 to protect our security now steal our privacy and trust. Thousands of financial experts, thousands of health and nutrition experts and thousands of lifestyle experts — all delivering advice and counsel across thousands of TV channels, millions of websites and more than a billion smartphones. Yet we’re poorer, fatter and far more anxious and fearful about everything than we were just a generation ago. What’s wrong with this picture?
JAFFER: How does that translate into our day-to-day work lives as media and marketing professionals?
JEFF: The same digital tools of scale that help brand advertisers reach out to millions of prospects have created too much toxic clutter for all but the biggest brands to penetrate. The same digital tools of scale that promise performance have created RTB and programmatic buying exchanges that drive performance down to statistical zero and drive publishers by the thousands right out of business. The same digital tools of scale that promised to simplify our work lives have turned advertising and marketing into Rube Goldberg contraptions of insane complexity.
JAFFER: What can we do about it? We all use the same basic digital tools, and we can’t just unplug.
JEFF: No, we can’t just unplug. The first thing we need to do is understand that this is less about the media per se and our digital technologies and more about our addictions to them. Only once we understand and accept our addiction to all things media and all things digital as the default condition, the rule rather than the exception, can we begin to deal with the real problem. Our addiction tells us that we can never have enough technology or data or news or entertainment, and the essential message of all addiction is always the same, regardless of the drug: “Eat all you want; we’ll make more.” Addiction is always about excess.
JAFFER: So what do you suggest?
JEFF: I suggest less. I suggest moderation. I suggest that we learn to slow down, learn to let go of failure and learn to embark on a path of deliberate simplicity. Restoring quality to our work and to our lives in what I call the Great Age of Mediation is a deliberate function of gradual subtraction and disintermediation.
JAFFER: Sounds easier said than done.
JEFF: It always is. Dealing effectively with any addiction is difficult at best. But it can be done. People do it every day.
JAFFER: The Media Addict’s Handbook offers remedial tools and a program to help individuals restore the quality of their lives. Do you offer something equivalent for group events and businesses?
JEFF: Thanks for asking, Jaffer. Yes, I speak at events of all kinds, everything from fund raisers for faith-based organizations and civic groups to corporate seminars and workshops. Anyone interested can contact me directly at 718-598-3744.
JAFFER: Thanks, Jeff.
JEFF: Thank you, Jaffer
October 30, 2013
Jeb Bush Calls Media ‘Crack Addicts’ for Politics – ABC News (blog)
See on Scoop.it – Media Addiction
Jeb Bush Calls Media ‘Crack Addicts’ for Politics
ABC News (blog)
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called the media “crack addicts” Sunday after he was asked who is more likely to end up in the White House one day — him or Sen.
See on abcnews.go.com
Are We All Social Media Addicts?
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Do you feel that you are spending more and more time on social media, be it in your working or home life?… (RT @Shelley_NeoPR: Are We All Social Media Addicts?
The consequences of modern-day addiction – ABC Local
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The consequences of modern-day addiction ABC Local “The inability it seems for some young people to not remain linked in with their colleagues through social media interferes with their study habits, exposes them to bullying, leads them to risky…
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Trichy teens get a high on social media sites – Times of India
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Trichy teens get a high on social media sites
Times of India
In Trichy, the parents as well as the medical fraternity are peeved by the way the teens are becoming addicted to internet-based social media.
See on timesofindia.indiatimes.com
