I was thinking the other day of the different ways in which information is being processed and judged when it is being consumed by reading or listening vs. when it is being consumed in the form of images or video (combined with the internet volumes and delivery).
In the first case, the person working with the information has to do a bit more work in putting things together, in considering multiple possible interpretations, searching for the right context in which is best to start building their own ideas based off the information as they understand it
In the second case, a person has a much more immediate access to what appears as a rich source of information, and the decision making as to what is being seen happens much faster – much easier to start building their ideas based on the “what you see is what you get” principle.
This made me think of the “the medium is the message“1 statement.
In this case, we have a medium which is making for a slow and more thought-through brain work, and we have another medium which is making for a fast and immediate brain work.
Reminded me of how we have a reptilian, mammalian, and neocortex layers of our brains. The neocortex is a much later evolutionary invention than the reptilian circuitry. With the neocortex humans were able to develop sophisticated capabilities like communicating through language, abstract thoughts, imagination, and navigating much more complex social structures than other animals.
Arguably, these slower and more complex brain mechanisms are what makes us human and what has enabled our human progress and civilization.
With the most recent advances in technology, images and video are surely becoming the primary medium through which information is being passed around. So where we have up until recently been working with a medium which is slow, now we are working with medium which is immediate. The message, which we were getting by utilizing the predominant medium, up until very recently in the civilized human history was “you have time to think this through”, and now for the past few years the message is “make an immediate decision or judgment”.
When this underlying message makes its way to our individual psychies on a massive scale, it sways the whole human race towards an earlier stage of our brain development and our capabilities to comprehend and work with reality.
In a way, our most recent achievements are reverting our progress to a pre-human and lizard-like reality where everyone and everything is a mortal enemy – eat or be eaten.
This message of immediacy might be what is at the core of much of the polarization in society that can be observed in past few years.
- “The medium is the message” is the quintessential statement from the “Understanding Media” book ↩︎
