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Addicted to Distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media
The Media just grows and grows, and progressively takes-over control of all the functionally useful social systems from politics to religion, from education to the arts. Yet the Mass Media is a system like no other – it has no function of its own, so it can just keep growing. It has no positive aim for society, and regards all knowledge just a matter of opinion. Therefore the Mass Media subverts all that is useful, and everything that gives meaning and purpose to life. Since the Media works like a drug, the first step is withdrawal, and a 'detox' program. Having escaped addiction, we may become free of the lies and lunacies of life in the Media bubble, and return to the realities of direct personal knowledge, actual experience and common sense.
- GenresPsychologyNonfiction
163 pages, Paperback
First published July 8, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 15, 2019
I don't know how to fairly review Dr. Charlton to someone unfamiliar with his work, or at least his outlook. If you do not share his premises, you will not enjoy this book, though I don't think he intended it to be enjoyable.
For starters, the formatting is loose and haphazard. If you're familiar with his blog you're used to his style; I think it takes time to appreciate. How to put it... if you like Jacques Ellul, or Owen Barfield, let's say, then you're expecting a number of proofs to appear in support of his enormous claims. You want to see the reasoning behind his theses. So if you follow the world outlook of our society (opinionated relativism being his name for it), then you're simply going to put the book down and move on. Better to start with the long, occasionally tedious, arguments picking apart the current consensus. Barfield, Ellul, Illich, Neil Postman, McLuhan: familiarity with any of these would be a good tool.
If the potential reader has visited those authors, is open to skepticism about the cult of technological process, is wary of mass media (especially sharing media), then there's a lot that reader can take from this book, and the formatting (both physical and philosophical) is not an issue; indeed, the quickness of the pace works to prevent illusions and defense mechanisms from springing up to deny the obvious.
You are addicted to mass media. It's not your fault, you can't avoid it, and worrying about who to blame will only delay the choices we each have to make about our involvement with it. Mass media is not like heroin. You will never be able to quit it entirely, but you can make choices that can have positive results for your capacity for independent thought. You may think you can use social media wisely, against the purposes of its founders, and perhaps you can, for awhile. But not forever. These mediums fundamentally work to disintegrate all that does not grow mass media. Anything in your life which is not optional and able to be transitioned into a consumer good will be attacked by media. It can't help it. It's what happens when the power of the means has swamped interest in ends.
He doesn't note a silver lining to our situation, but does say the fundamental choice made clear by the rise of mass media is really the same as its ever been, just starker. And that's the silver lining: this immersive medium works to create an alternate reality, and its success reveals what the choice has been for millennia: to pay attention, in all humility, to reality; or, to escape to a world of idols in order to develop illusory power against reality. To be human, or to reject humanity.
He also offers actual practical tips for how to live among people immersed in mass media. If you've stepped back from the mainstream at any point, you know how difficult even basic small talk has become (especially since 2016). Dr. Charlton's advice is simple, useful, and has the benefit of not threatening to turn all social interactions into opportunities to self-righteously pontificate on how bad things are. We just have to meet people where they are, silently refuse participation in lies, but continue to seek doors and windows opening out onto the real world, which, thank heavens, still exists.
For starters, the formatting is loose and haphazard. If you're familiar with his blog you're used to his style; I think it takes time to appreciate. How to put it... if you like Jacques Ellul, or Owen Barfield, let's say, then you're expecting a number of proofs to appear in support of his enormous claims. You want to see the reasoning behind his theses. So if you follow the world outlook of our society (opinionated relativism being his name for it), then you're simply going to put the book down and move on. Better to start with the long, occasionally tedious, arguments picking apart the current consensus. Barfield, Ellul, Illich, Neil Postman, McLuhan: familiarity with any of these would be a good tool.
If the potential reader has visited those authors, is open to skepticism about the cult of technological process, is wary of mass media (especially sharing media), then there's a lot that reader can take from this book, and the formatting (both physical and philosophical) is not an issue; indeed, the quickness of the pace works to prevent illusions and defense mechanisms from springing up to deny the obvious.
You are addicted to mass media. It's not your fault, you can't avoid it, and worrying about who to blame will only delay the choices we each have to make about our involvement with it. Mass media is not like heroin. You will never be able to quit it entirely, but you can make choices that can have positive results for your capacity for independent thought. You may think you can use social media wisely, against the purposes of its founders, and perhaps you can, for awhile. But not forever. These mediums fundamentally work to disintegrate all that does not grow mass media. Anything in your life which is not optional and able to be transitioned into a consumer good will be attacked by media. It can't help it. It's what happens when the power of the means has swamped interest in ends.
He doesn't note a silver lining to our situation, but does say the fundamental choice made clear by the rise of mass media is really the same as its ever been, just starker. And that's the silver lining: this immersive medium works to create an alternate reality, and its success reveals what the choice has been for millennia: to pay attention, in all humility, to reality; or, to escape to a world of idols in order to develop illusory power against reality. To be human, or to reject humanity.
He also offers actual practical tips for how to live among people immersed in mass media. If you've stepped back from the mainstream at any point, you know how difficult even basic small talk has become (especially since 2016). Dr. Charlton's advice is simple, useful, and has the benefit of not threatening to turn all social interactions into opportunities to self-righteously pontificate on how bad things are. We just have to meet people where they are, silently refuse participation in lies, but continue to seek doors and windows opening out onto the real world, which, thank heavens, still exists.
January 14, 2020
Basically a rant
Charlton presents a list of assertions that mass media is a leaderless and demonic form of leftism aimed to undermine conservative Christians. While Charlton does hit on some real problems with modern media landscape, he ignores the commercial functions of media and that it does have leaders: funders. The only real examples are the Jimmy Sevile affair, which was particularly vile.
Charlton presents a list of assertions that mass media is a leaderless and demonic form of leftism aimed to undermine conservative Christians. While Charlton does hit on some real problems with modern media landscape, he ignores the commercial functions of media and that it does have leaders: funders. The only real examples are the Jimmy Sevile affair, which was particularly vile.
Read
September 26, 2019The overbearing pro-religion (Christianity), traditional sexuality and family values-saturated agenda permeated the book where claims such as mass media being inherently evil, leftist and not controlled by specific persons or groups were made without any support to back them.
Just like any medium, it can be used and molded to fit its aims. It's up to us on how to engage with it.
And the below was the icing on the cake...
"A lot of modern life is about rubbing people’s noses in
stuff that they find disgusting, repellent, sickening – this sometimes seem
like the main activity and underlying purpose of the Mass Media, solidly-backed
by the highbrow artistic establishment.
And this activity is regarded as morally-admirable: Samuel
Beckett got a Nobel literature prize for doing it better than anyone else.
Indeed, the whole thing originated in high art in the 19th
century French-centred decadent period which developed into the disgust
expressed and evoked by James Joyce’s Ulysses; TS Eliot’s The
Wasteland; Picasso’s Cubism, and the pathological distortions of painters
such as Stanley Spencer, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud; the poisonous dissonant
elements in Mahler, Stravinsky and Kurt Weill, and innumerable seamy and sordid
movies and Art photography since the 1960s.
The strategy is, it seems, to shock us so frequently
as to desensitize us to the point that nothing can shock us;
so that we will neither ‘judge’, nor prohibit, nor reject evil – because then
we will get-used-to evil, and then eventually to accept and promote evil (since
we have long since ceased to feel evil as evil).
The end of it all is finally to regard evil as the only Good
– since we now reflexly, and dishonestly, unmask all virtue as
hypocritical, all beauty as Kitsch; and have become so jaded with simplicity
and wholesomeness that we find Good insipid and crave the sharp stimulus of
sin."
Just like any medium, it can be used and molded to fit its aims. It's up to us on how to engage with it.
And the below was the icing on the cake...
"A lot of modern life is about rubbing people’s noses in
stuff that they find disgusting, repellent, sickening – this sometimes seem
like the main activity and underlying purpose of the Mass Media, solidly-backed
by the highbrow artistic establishment.
And this activity is regarded as morally-admirable: Samuel
Beckett got a Nobel literature prize for doing it better than anyone else.
Indeed, the whole thing originated in high art in the 19th
century French-centred decadent period which developed into the disgust
expressed and evoked by James Joyce’s Ulysses; TS Eliot’s The
Wasteland; Picasso’s Cubism, and the pathological distortions of painters
such as Stanley Spencer, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud; the poisonous dissonant
elements in Mahler, Stravinsky and Kurt Weill, and innumerable seamy and sordid
movies and Art photography since the 1960s.
The strategy is, it seems, to shock us so frequently
as to desensitize us to the point that nothing can shock us;
so that we will neither ‘judge’, nor prohibit, nor reject evil – because then
we will get-used-to evil, and then eventually to accept and promote evil (since
we have long since ceased to feel evil as evil).
The end of it all is finally to regard evil as the only Good
– since we now reflexly, and dishonestly, unmask all virtue as
hypocritical, all beauty as Kitsch; and have become so jaded with simplicity
and wholesomeness that we find Good insipid and crave the sharp stimulus of
sin."
November 22, 2017
Many of Charlton's views concerning the media can easily be disputed or challenged, but his overall message makes sense to me, especially in our contemporary world of 24-7 media coverage / social media fetishism.
August 9, 2020
Excellent Disposition
A very good polemic about Mass Media and especially oriented towards its modern forms, Social and others. It may have very much convinced me to consume leas of it.
A very good polemic about Mass Media and especially oriented towards its modern forms, Social and others. It may have very much convinced me to consume leas of it.
March 4, 2018
book canceled due to undisclosed religious bias dominating the subject matter. thats not very scientific of you, dr psychiatrist
March 23, 2021
Insightful
October 1, 2015
"The Mass Media makes us alienated; and the Mass Media also provides the two main answers to alienation: escape into distraction and desensitization to the situation. In this the Mass [M]edia acts exactly like an addictive drug: a drug that itself creates a state of distress for which the drug itself is the only answer. The Mass Media first distracts with deliberate inversions of the Good: ugliness, depravity and lies, which keep our minds off the overwhelming fact that modernity presents life as meaningless, purposeless and (briefly) existing in an uncaring universe. Then the Mass Media desensitizes us to the hideous, the immoral and the dishonest. The ratchet turns another notch. The Media addict is drawn deeper into dependence, and into sin." (66-67)
"a Mass Media world in which artistic depictions and 'news' reportage focuses on inducing us to empathize with antiheroes, is actually a world which in practice encourages sin and vice and suppresses real goodness and heroism. In a nutshell, the dominant modern antiheroic narrative generally encourages us to be basically-evil; but with some politically correct redeeming feature such as kindness or a passion for 'social justice' . . ." (80-81)
"The main consequence of pervasive social communication media is therefore seen to be that people are out of touch with their environment for more of the time, that they downgrade the actual people they are with, and the actual environment that there [sic] inhabit; that they never self-remember (Me! Here! Now!); that they are prevented from experiencing in real-time the life they are in. In the recent past, a person sitting or walking alone might be stimulated to look around, listen, smell, feel the air flowing past them - be where they are. Not now. They are on their mobile phones and inside the Media bubble. And they can and do avoid experiencing the here and the now." (102-103)
"The media world is one in which religion and holidays and other people and work and leisure and everything else has become primarily something to contribute to the Mass Media; in which peoples' primary motivation in doing anything other than consume the mass media is that they have something 'interesting' to contribute to the Mass Media - photos and videos to share opinions to share, news to share, triumphs and disasters to share. Those with nothing to share on these social media (or with no wish to share) are out-of-the-loop - boring, uncool, lame, unpopular . . . This is a world in which the evaluations that people make concerning truth, beauty and virtue are themselves calibrated to promote engagement with the Mass Media. So whatever people do apart from the Mass Media is increasingly done on the basis of evaluations from the Mass Media, since these things are being done (implicitly) in order (or in hope) that they may be contributed to the Mass Media. Much of what people do now is done so they have things suitable to contribute to the network of other mobile phone users." (110-111)
"a Mass Media world in which artistic depictions and 'news' reportage focuses on inducing us to empathize with antiheroes, is actually a world which in practice encourages sin and vice and suppresses real goodness and heroism. In a nutshell, the dominant modern antiheroic narrative generally encourages us to be basically-evil; but with some politically correct redeeming feature such as kindness or a passion for 'social justice' . . ." (80-81)
"The main consequence of pervasive social communication media is therefore seen to be that people are out of touch with their environment for more of the time, that they downgrade the actual people they are with, and the actual environment that there [sic] inhabit; that they never self-remember (Me! Here! Now!); that they are prevented from experiencing in real-time the life they are in. In the recent past, a person sitting or walking alone might be stimulated to look around, listen, smell, feel the air flowing past them - be where they are. Not now. They are on their mobile phones and inside the Media bubble. And they can and do avoid experiencing the here and the now." (102-103)
"The media world is one in which religion and holidays and other people and work and leisure and everything else has become primarily something to contribute to the Mass Media; in which peoples' primary motivation in doing anything other than consume the mass media is that they have something 'interesting' to contribute to the Mass Media - photos and videos to share opinions to share, news to share, triumphs and disasters to share. Those with nothing to share on these social media (or with no wish to share) are out-of-the-loop - boring, uncool, lame, unpopular . . . This is a world in which the evaluations that people make concerning truth, beauty and virtue are themselves calibrated to promote engagement with the Mass Media. So whatever people do apart from the Mass Media is increasingly done on the basis of evaluations from the Mass Media, since these things are being done (implicitly) in order (or in hope) that they may be contributed to the Mass Media. Much of what people do now is done so they have things suitable to contribute to the network of other mobile phone users." (110-111)
March 18, 2015
Some great thoughts and some great conclusions. many quotable passages. But I can't help but disagree with several of his claims. Nonetheless I highly recommend it for the overall message, which is to reduce or eliminate mass media usage.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews