Media Distortions
I’m a bit of a news junkie. I tend to utilize my local radio and newspaper and also read the headlines on “Google News.” For me, it’s partially curiosity about how things in the bigger world are going combined with a wicked addiction to endless scrolling. It’s a habit that I’m a little bit uncomfortable with for a couple reasons. In the past it has been mostly because my habit can turn into a bit of a time suck, pulling me away from a million other things that need my attention. The other reason why I’m uncomfortable with my habit relates to some words of wisdom from a pastor/mentor/friend in my formative years. He liked to say: “The people you spend time with and the books you read are a pretty good representation of who you will be in 5 years.” Though I’d like to think that my media consumption is benign, my conviction is deepening that I am being shaped subconsciously by the media I consume in ways that I don’t want to be.
Because of it’s business model, web-driven media is trying to capture and hold our attention for as long as possible to either sell us on a product or else sell our attention to other advertisers. While I have nothing against the need to advertise to run a business, I think some of the ways that our attention is captured takes advantage of and grooms some of our darker impulses as humans. While it’s not practical to think that we can be media free in a media saturated world, I do think that we can become more informed consumers to limit some of the more degrading ways we can can be shaped by our inputs. Below I’m going to list and expound upon a few of my hunches for how we’re being shaped by our relationship to media. As you read through this, maybe take a personal inventory to see if any rings true for you personally.
Number one is body image. Even if you aren’t a regular reader of ET or PEOPLE magazine, just scrolling past headlines or advertisements featuring men and women with very unrealistic bodies or appearances strongly influences both what we expect to see in our partners or what we hope to see in the mirror. Rates of cosmetic plastic surgery continue to increase because over the course of a lifetime, exposure to these airbrushed images deepens our unconscious shame that we don’t measure up to these standards. In addition to appealing to our shame, these images also appeal to and inflame our sexual drives. The most blatant example finds expression in our culture’s increasing consumption of pornography which is on the rise. A recent survey captured this by finding that 9-16 percent of women and 27-40 percent of men intentionally viewed pornography in the last week. In my practice this is an increasingly common presenting issue that people are wanting to address. This vicious cycle of shame and desire proves to be a hard one to break for those that are trying to reclaim a healthy vision of sexuality.
For me, in my rural lifestyle, I’m aware cognitively that I’m aging and that my body is not going to look the way that it looked when I was 16. I feel strong from the manual labor of my homestead, but rather than feeling proud of the way that my body serves me, I sometimes become aware of pangs of urgency and embarrassment when I look in the mirror and see a few extra pounds hanging about my waist. Becoming aware of this makes me feel shallow and reminds me of God’s conversation with newly fallen man in the garden: “Who told you that you were naked.” I want to rejoice as my hair grays, my shoulders stoop and my back aches, counting the changes as my badges of honor from a life lived in accordance with my values and dreams. I don’t want to live with a sense of regret that I don’t measure up to a standard of appearance set by some airbrushed or computer generated male model that doesn’t know a hatchet from a splitting maul.
The second media distortion to explore is that outrage generates higher numbers of clicks than other content does which in turn, serves content providers by holding attention on their domains. Anger is a good and healthy part of the human experience that ideally is meant to help us identify a breach in the boundaries of what we consider sacred and re-establish a healthy perimeter. In most cases this is actually a social emotion and serves relationships in the long run by helping them get back on track when they’ve turned sour. However, because anger also provides a temporary sense of expansive power, it can provide just enough of a sense of control to make us want to stay in that state. The more distal the sources of our ire, the safer we feel to maintain our head of steam longer and the easier it becomes to dehumanize or objectify our enemies. We get to avoid the arduous, but growth promoting conversations to work through the anger and repair the relationships to which it belongs and instead immerse in the savage throbbing nerves of hatred. Algorithms are ruthless in this way because they can dial into exactly what flavor of outrage is going to hook us in uniquely.
Related to this is the way that our media can be used to feed a false sense of “us.” While we all have a sacred longing to be apart of a story or movement that’s bigger than ourselves this longing can be groomed and twisted by toxic individuals and systems. Characteristic of a “toxic we” is a sense of an unassailable possession of all the answers. You can see this in media outlets that are unabashedly “left” or “right.” Both, in their own nuanced way signal a sense of scorn for the stupidity of the “other side.” Sometimes our alignment with a sense of “we” is simply a bid to avoid a sense of scorn from the leaders or local standard bearers of the movements. One thing I notice about the algorithms is that they are very eager to try to find which tribe we belong to and reinforce our membership by directing us to information that fuels the fallacy of confirmation bias, ensuring that we spend yet more time glued to our screens.
These combined influences take away from the original glory that is ours by birthright as individual, autonomous, unique human being made in the image and likeness of a benevolent God. Like an abusive relationship, an unhealthy, uncritical connection to media can reinforce hard to notice but operable feelings of shame, fear, anger and lust that reinforce and strengthen the habits of our consumption. While it’s easy to see this at work in other people, it takes a little honest soul-searching to see it in ourselves.
Did any of these thoughts prick your ears? Are you in need of a media fast, a considerate and thoughtful foray into the talking points of the “other side” or a more conscious and critical consumption of what sources have your ear?
