Media fast

Via Andrew Bartlett’s blog, a story, from the Washington Post, about a US college class’s experiment – 24 hours without “without any kind of electronic media”.

The class was reading Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by the late New York University communications professor Neil Postman. According to the lecturer Danna L Walker, Postman was concerned about American “society [being] destroyed by its worship of mass consumption and escapism. Postman believed television, in particular, was constraining higher thought and ‘transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business’ without our realizing it. He thought that, because we are engineered to avoid our own imprisonment, we just needed to be aware of what our growing addiction to media was doing to us.”

Writing about her students, Walker said:

Could my students, in fact, survive “the grueling pain that was the 24-hour, e-media fast,” as one self-described iPod and computer addict would later write in her paper?

The 50 young women and men in my class at AU are what are called digital natives or “millennials,” those born between 1980 and 2000, many of whom graduated from high school as the 21st century dawned. Researchers say they will constitute the largest generation in American history, outnumbering baby boomers by as much as 33 percent.

The students’ reactions:

“I was in shock,” wrote one student. “I honestly did not think I could accomplish this task. The 24 hours I spent in what seemed like complete isolation became known as one of the toughest days I have had to endure.”

Another student apparently did not see the irony in this statement: “I felt like I would be wasting my time doing the project. I did not want to give up my daily schedule, which mainly includes lying on my couch, watching television and playing The Sims2 — a [life simulator] computer game.”

Walker ends her article saying:

I’m not from the we’re-all-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket school of media thought. I use most of the electronic gadgets my students do. E-media keep us up to the minute on information, facilitate relationships without geographic constraint, make logistics easier and sometimes help us relax and fight boredom.

But I do know of a world my students haven’t inhabited — a world in which we may have had less ready access to information but had more power to turn it off and reflect. I hold on to the hope that we’re not too far gone in our media stupor to recapture the idealistic vision of the era of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, meaningful discourse and human-to-human interaction in the public sphere.

We recently had a weekend with no Net connection, but we did still have all the other usual diversions of radio, tv, the phone, games, music, and so on. I wonder how I’d cope without all that. I think it would probably bevery good for me to switch off totally from time to time. I’d need to get over my fear of being Out of The Loop, though.