It’s amazing how many times in the past year I’ve used the phrase “new normal“. Whether it’s managing intense change resulting from an “acceleration of the acceleration”, as David Taras author of Digital Mosaic, Media, Power and Identity in Canada puts it, or feeling unsurprised by the latest headlines following a twitterfest, “normal” feels like it’s in a state of perpetual redefinition. Some things deserve to be normalized, and media’s influence (particularly in digital spaces) is helping that to happen. It’s also becoming clear, however, that there are a great many aspects of our society that are becoming normalized in concerning ways. Are we living out the myth of the frog and boiling water?
As the myth goes, a frog dropped into boiling water reacts to the danger by immediately jumping to safety. Place the frog in tepid water and slowly bring it to a boil, however, and the frog boils to death, unaware of the danger slowly building up around it. Science has disproven this myth, but it’s an effective metaphor for how insidious our environment can be if we’re not paying attention.
Taras’s Digital Mosaic brings a balanced but deservedly critical approach to the topic of media, power and identity from a refreshingly Canadian perspective. In addition to the positives of our digitally connected world, Taras helps shine a light on the dangers of what he calls “media shock”, hiding behind a veil of convenience designed to entertain (versus inform), with the ultimate goal of keeping our attention. The normalization of ever-increasing digital consumption – with all of its algorithms and big data – is taking its toll. When we lift the veil, what do we find?
It’s impacting what we think about, when we think about it, and how we think about it.
Listen to what former Google ethicist Tristan Harris has to say on this. The first few lines of Harris’s talk sound like they are straight from an Orwell novel or dystopian movie, not real life. Yet, it’s normalized.
It’s impacting our privacy, and not in good ways.
Here’s just a sampling: Canadian government monitoring social media, big business (ab)use, or hackers in our wired home products and devices (even baby monitors). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, wants us to believe that privacy is no longer a social norm. Normalized.
It’s impacting our relationships.
As an example, Taras shares an emerging phenomenon called “absence-in-presence”. How often have we experienced someone physically present, but absent courtesy of their phone consuming their attention? As Taras states, it’s surprising “the extent to which this continual state of partial attention and distraction seems to have become widely accepted, despite the offence that it might give to those who are being ignored.” In other words, this form of rudeness has become, you guessed it, normalized.
(Sadly, scrolling through Facebook is even changing mother-baby bonding.)
It’s negatively impacting our democracy.
Last November, The Economist shared that “Facebook, Google and Twitter were supposed to save politics as good information drove out prejudice and falsehood. Something has gone very wrong.” Beginning with the advent of cable TV, research has found strong correlations between increased media consumption and reduced voter turn-out. In fact, Taras gives us Markus Prior’s conclusion that “media fragmentation was almost single-handedly to blame for reducing voter turnout in elections and for triggering a downward slide in civic knowledge”. As a public, it appears being entertained trumps being informed. But without informed and engaged citizens, in Taras’s words “we become in effect a democracy without citizens“. Add into this the politically polarizing effects of algorithms, filter bubbles and echo chambers and we have scary, scary stuff. But…normalized.
George Orwell left us a legacy that goes far beyond great literature, as Thomas Ricks shares in this Politico article:
“In [Orwell’s] novels and essays, he instructs us even now in how to be alert to the numbing rhetoric of government pronouncements, of pervasive official and corporate surveillance, and most of all, of intrusions by both public and commercial powers into the realm of the private individual.”
From one frog to another, maybe it’s time to jump.
‘Til next week,
DLM
P.S. Click here for a fitting “bittersweet symphony” performance from Live 8.