Why we need to Media Detox

Are you who you think you are? The modern world tends to emphasize the idea of personal autonomy. We are our own independent and self-sufficient creatures without the need for other social entities to define our identity. To be able to define one's own identity on one's own terms is considered the ultimate goal of the freedom of expression offered by modern society.

The reality is that we have, wittingly or unwittingly, surrendered much of the formation of our own personalities to outside forces of media. As Edwards Bernays said in his book Propaganda, “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Television (and film) tends to be a passive medium, encouraging indolence, and creating viewers who can put their minds on autopilot for a few hours a day, leaving the real thinking to the big wigs of society. Unlike reading a book, which activates the imagination and pushes you to continually reform your thought processes, television allows us to be only receivers of the toxic sludge that passes for modern programming. So deep has is the penetration of media in our psyches that if we were to remove all the names, the cultural references, the imagery & icons from our brains, very little may remain.

They say that much of our personalities are formed by trying to be like others. This may seem a weakness, but truthfully this is fundamental human characteristic. Since childhood, human beings are imitative creatures, searching for external stimuli to inform one's own process of identity formation. This is why it is so important to have positive role models in one's formative years, they provide templates for us to build our own personalities. In the case of television though, the 'others' are not even people we see in the flesh or interact with.

Broadcast media tends to affect us on two levels. The first is the level of belief. Beliefs relate to whether we consider anything to be true or false. Did Armstrong land on the moon? Does gravity exist? Are cold showers better than hot showers? Our worldview on what is or is not falsifiable is based to a great degree on media perception. But such beliefs can be malleable when countered by evidence to the contrary.

The impact of media on the second level, that of attitudes, is far more insidious. Attitudes relate to our predisposition, our instinctual deep-seeded emotive response to situations. Once the media has influenced an attitude, it tends to stick and usually takes much more time and effort to shift compared to beliefs. When facts are presented that clash with existing attitudes, our beliefs tend to incline towards attitudes rather than reality. A classic example is how, several years after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the American public persisted in their bogus belief that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction despite ample evidence to the contrary. It was a belief that settled well with prevailing attitudes.

This is why we need a media detox. A conventional detox (short for detoxification) is an intensive process of removal of dangerous toxins from the body. A media detox follows a similar route. It requires weaning oneself off of the broadcast media that has dominated our lives. This can be done gradually or as a sudden break But in the end we need to free the captivity over of our minds and embrace life outside a box. And like a regular detox, a media detox would require dealing with some withdrawal effects, such as the slowing of time.

There may be no such thing as a 'healthy consumption' of television or film. Yes, there are movies, shows or channels that have substantive content, but being able to limit oneself to watching this sliver of useful content in a sea of time-wasting drivel is a huge challenge. We shouldn't be accomplices to our own mental degradation. Giving ourselves an extended media break can allow our brains some breathing room to be able to focus on life as it passes us by.