ESSAY
Here’s What Happens When You Stare into That Screen
Despite your sophistication, you’re being played. Here’s what you can do about it
Many years ago, a tobacco industry executive famously described cigarettes as nicotine delivery devices, with an overriding (and obvious) purpose: to get people addicted so that they Buy More. It’s a proven business model used by drug purveyors of every stripe, going all the way back to our ancestors in the jungle hawking their own plant-based anxiety suppressants. Og! Dude! C’mere, try this bitchin’ root! Yah!
Cigarettes, as everyone well knows, are a major cause of respiratory disease, and a good way to speed up your demise if you’re in the market for a really brutal way to go.
Along similar lines, many of today’s businesses use the web as an advertising delivery device. The content we see as we stare at our screens exists primarily to deliver the ads that we see. Not unlike the machines in the movie The Matrix siphoning off our raw biological energy, in the wired world it’s our attention that’s being harvested.
Attention may be the most valuable commodity of our time. For once an entity or organization gets its mitts on it, know that you’ve been grabbed by the short and curlies. You will then be subjected to endless pressure campaigns to Buy More, which will come at you from angles that are not always apparent, affecting you in subtle ways that can elude your defenses.
When you watch video or TV, you are lulled into a passive, highly receptive state. Your guard lowers, as does your critical thinking faculty. The barn door of your psyche swings open.
You become open to influence in ways that are worth pure gold to organizations that may not have your best interests at heart, which is why some of them are willing to pay big bucks — many millions, for instance, for a single minute of advertising time on popular shows such as the Super Bowl, watched by 100 million wide-open, laid-bare souls — to catch you in this undefended state.
What happens then?
Mostly, you’re lied to and manipulated. The assault profoundly affects you, no matter how sophisticated you may think you are.
Staring into your screen, you are immersed in a world of subterfuge. You are cooed at. You are stroked. You are made to purr. A symphony of beautiful smiles, alluring graphics, and stirring musical accompaniments envelops you. Adrift in this pleasant dream, your grasp of what’s real and what’s fantasy weakens.
Of course, you know exactly what’s happening. It just feels so good!
You well know, for instance, that the actors speaking to you in commercials have been paid to deliver a message. A message that may directly contradict their real-life beliefs. No matter. The actor, often an attractive young woman (or man) stares imploringly at you from the screen, as if acknowledging you. Lie.
The collection of pixels that appear to be eyes can’t possibly connect with yours any more than a sheet of paper can. The actor extols the greatness of a product — say, Princess Lovely Lipstick — that’s sure to make you more beautiful. Lie. It won’t do much beyond make your lips shine a bit. The actor says that she herself loves it. Oh, really? She probably never even heard of it until she got this gig.
Lie, lie, lie.
The untruths flow over, around, and through you with all the sparkly effervescence of a mountain stream gushing down Boulder Canyon. Now, that’s true. It may very well have that feel.
We’re not dummies. We weren’t born yesterday. We are hip to all of this. We know exactly what’s going on. However, the hard drive of the supercomputer up in our noggin is not as discerning. It’s a machine gobbling up data, like a dog eating kibbles. Yum! More! Arf! Arf!
All those lies, plopping down on our hard drives, day after day, week after week, year after year. Watch enough of this manipulative garbage and you will think you need that lipstick, those jeans, and that piss-water beer, just so you can hold your head up among your friends and feel relevant.
The truth, of course, is that you need virtually none of the items you see advertised.
We are assaulted at every turn by the sh*show. Digitization has become weaponization.
We would benefit by tuning out quite a bit of this noise, and allowing ourselves to begin to fall out of love with our screens. It’s true that connecting with what’s onscreen seems to make us feel more in touch, less lonely, and more in sync with the larger community and the world. But quite often what’s happening is exactly the opposite.
We are being whisked farther and farther out to sea, farther from an authentic, unsullied experience of ourselves, the world, our circles of focus, and our humanity. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety are the predictable results of such anti-life activity.
Pervasive mass media is one of the reasons why depression is epidemic today and why it can seem that virtually everyone has it. It may be difficult to detach from the media’s sh*t show for long, since it’s ubiquitous and such a part of our lives, but when and if you can, there’s much to be gained.
If you’ve been feeling further afield from OK as the years tick on and the world becomes more digitized, it may be worth looking at the off switch on a few of your devices. Consider focusing instead on taking a few conscious breaths to relocate yourself back in actual reality.
Try it right now. It’s easy. Off.
Adapted from “unGlommed, The Guerrilla Approach to Beating Depression”
