Total Media Fast: Day 4
After noticing my persistently elevated emotional state, I made a conscious choice to do a total media fast starting Sunday, November 19, 2017.
What this entails is not engaging with the news, facebook, twitter, youtube, or any other form of social media. It also entails doing things to engage myself or others in that otherwise-spent time. Which is not as simple as it seems. I may encounter an occasional newspaper... or catch a news program listened to by my wife. Or catch a conversation about the news around me. However, I will simply do my best.
I start to recognize my own mental and emotional state that my attention on the news has distracted me from. I notice my elevated agitation. And my own negativity. I notice that I have not been incredibly hard on myself. Driving myself to the edge of tolerance...and justifying my own intolerance and emotional absence in my life, my relationships, and my family.
Attention is the currency of our modern age. The goal of our media is not necessarily to inform our choices but to capture and maintain our attention. It is to hijack our emotionally reactive limbic system in the service of an ever-escalated and increasingly-polarized culture war... the winners of which are the owners of the medium used rather than the victims so illuminated. It is, indeed, to manufacture our consent to one authoritarian ideology or another. Thus, to intentionally and consciously direct our own attention becomes a revolutionary act.
Learning how to do this--and more importantly to what end--is not an easy process. It entails discovering and committing to principles that I want to express with my life. It also entails understanding and disengaging from implicit principles based on an automatic agreement with dominant cultural norms.
What this entails is not engaging with the news, facebook, twitter, youtube, or any other form of social media. It also entails doing things to engage myself or others in that otherwise-spent time. Which is not as simple as it seems. I may encounter an occasional newspaper... or catch a news program listened to by my wife. Or catch a conversation about the news around me. However, I will simply do my best.
I start to recognize my own mental and emotional state that my attention on the news has distracted me from. I notice my elevated agitation. And my own negativity. I notice that I have not been incredibly hard on myself. Driving myself to the edge of tolerance...and justifying my own intolerance and emotional absence in my life, my relationships, and my family.
Attention is the currency of our modern age. The goal of our media is not necessarily to inform our choices but to capture and maintain our attention. It is to hijack our emotionally reactive limbic system in the service of an ever-escalated and increasingly-polarized culture war... the winners of which are the owners of the medium used rather than the victims so illuminated. It is, indeed, to manufacture our consent to one authoritarian ideology or another. Thus, to intentionally and consciously direct our own attention becomes a revolutionary act.
Learning how to do this--and more importantly to what end--is not an easy process. It entails discovering and committing to principles that I want to express with my life. It also entails understanding and disengaging from implicit principles based on an automatic agreement with dominant cultural norms.
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