I believe I invented this term. As I understand it, “media” is a term taken directly from Latin, and is the plural of “medium”. We don’t think about it, but the term media itself conveys a sense of transmission, of centrality, of connecting one thing, person or idea with another. Chalk drawings can be an artistic medium. A highway can be a transportational medium. We use the term medium for people who claim to be able to communicate with the dead.
Our Media, then, understood collectively, can be understood as mediating the world for us. The world in all its naked glory is out there somewhere, and what we get to see is some small portion of it, as selected for importance, and as sculpted via the direct perceivers. Not everything that could be news becomes news. Not everything that becomes news happened the way it is reported. Something happens somewhere, it enters a tube, then it hits us.
The first point in this regard I will make is that self evidently our own personal experiences–what we see of the physical world, what we observe as the behavior of matter, and social institutions, and human psychology etc–are unmediated, at least in principle. Yet paradoxically they can become mediated, if rather than trust our own eyes or intuition, we instead process things which have actually happened to us by our internalized understanding of what is POSSIBLE.
Common sense, you see, is in my view common. We are more or less born with it, and add to every time we stub our toe, or unintentionally offend someone, or otherwise have an unpleasant bump with “the world”.
This is one point. The more important point I wanted to make, and the reason for the neologism (other than my fondness for them) is a perception I had the other day.
I went to see “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. As always when I go to the movie theater, I was struck by the largeness of everything, and the loudness of everything. I was struck by how our lives are pervaded–filled, centrally–with media. We watch TV as children. We watch TV as adolescents and adults. Our first experience with “sex” is almost certainly via the computer or DVD. We take our iPods everywhere. We listen to music in cars. Many people fall asleep watching TV. Between the internet and TV, most people consume media for probably a third of their lives. I’m not talking waking life: I literally think 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work, and 8 hours of internet/TV is not too far off. Obviously, most people surf the internet even while at work.
Always, always, always, we have imaginary figures in front of us. We have movie actors who seem brave and noble–or villainous and interesting, or sexy, or mercurial, or ideosyncratic, or whatever floats our particular boat–who are in front of us all the time. All the time. All the time. In supermarket checkout lanes. On TV. In newspapers.
In the movie theater, I was looking at some young men I would call freaks. They were fat, pale, and unhealthy looking. And I know they spent a lot of time watching movies, and probably playing immersive video games. Many kids nowadays spend so much time consuming media, that they never develop proper social skills. They are like bread that is half baked. They are morally retarded in important ways. You know the people of whom I speak. You see them. They are nice enough, but you always know there is something going on in their heads that is not of this world.
They are not full members of our social order. Yet who can say anymore who IS of our social order? Who are we? Media–in the middle–has taken up all the reference points we used to have. The Bible? Gone for all but those who go to church, which in this country at any rate is still quite a few people, which is encouraging in a way.
It seems to me that where genuine community could stand, in all too many cases there is an array of vivid and unforgettable images burned. It is clear from evidence that exposure to violent media mutes natural empathy and directly supports cynicism and–presumably following–depression.
Can we not say that in many cases where the possibility for the expression of affection and loyalty and goodwill may have happened in another time, now we have this sort of childlike, imbecilic, pseudoconnection, more afraid than open, more symptomatic of a childlike emotional sensitivity, and lack of capacity for mature connection with others?
It seems that way to me. We have created a new type of human being, unlike anything seen before. I literally think our interactions with media, with images of death and love and novelty, are rewiring our physical brains in ways that no one has yet fully grasped or investigated.