Author: tworuru

Today’s TLDR

• Yes, the medium is the message, and it might be rewiring your brain
• If digital media modes are leaking into your meatspace, try putting the phone down
• Litany Against Smartphones
• Unlike, Unsubscribe

I am here, in my mode

There’s a thing called Tetris Syndrome I think I’ve remarked on before; essentially it’s that thing where if you spend all day playing a videogame you’ll keep seeing it when you shut your eyes. I get the same thing, but for books; if I read something compelling enough I spend the next while hearing my inner dialogue as if narrated by the author. I assume this happens to other people, although when I’ve mentioned it to other people I’ve weathered a brief stare followed by a quick subject-change. It can be like time-travel, especially if you’re reading Austen or O’Brien or something in similar prose.

It happens with other media as well. I know that if I spent too long – any amount of time, really – on Twitter or the increasingly Twitter-like Bluesky, I start to think in terms of tweets, replies, the omnipresent strident snark, witticisms I could render into Tweetish form (which I would get oh so many likes and reposts for). This is as horrible as it sounds. Lately, I have been wondering if something similar happens with all our regular digital diets and interactions.

Medium, meet message

If you did media studies or similar you may have come across the theories/ramblings of a bloke called Marshall McLuhan who is remembered today for coining “the medium is the message,” a tricky little phrase that essentially means that the meaning of a piece of media is inextricable from the way it’s delivered. A letter has a different vibe – and a different effect – to newsprint which is different to a movie which is different to TV which is different to hypertext on a computer screen which is different to the endless algorithmic scroll of TikTok on an iPhone.

McLuhan’s mostly impenetrable but prescient guff came to mind again when I went to Bluesky to try to copy my username and accidentally found myself scrolling for what was probably only a few minutes. Afterward, I felt the echoes of the online conversations I’d glanced at for hours.

(And even now I feel a silent urge emanating from the smartphone within eyeshot. It’s like having a Tamagotchi, except it waterboards you every time you pick it up.)

My contention is that the mediums of modern information delivery – hypertext, email, algorithmic scrolling, doomscrolling – are modulating how we think, act and react to things in the non-digital realm; if you find yourself absently composing tweets while you’re doing the dishes, mentally framing conversation as comments, or ruminating about something you read on that curiously addictive gossip site before realising you’ve got no idea why you walked into the kitchen, this could be why. This isn’t an original idea; it’s essentially what authors like Johann Hari are on about with the likes of Stolen Focus, but if I pay attention I can quite definitely feel it happening, live, in my day-to-day.

O rly?

My anecdote is one thing, but actual evidence for this specific effect is harder to come by. My research well ran dry on this one (perhaps readers can help) but there’s enough here to put a glaze on my half-baked theory. For instance, there a psychology paper called “Linguistic Style Matching in Social Interaction,” about “the psychometric properties of language in dyadic interactions” which makes me think of researchers trying to talk to oak trees. But of course that’s a dryad; a dyad is a sociological term for the smallest possible group of people – a pair. This, and other research, shows linguistic style matching or interactive alignment; essentially that two people talking together start talking like each other.

In this scheme, two interlocutors simultaneously align their representations at different linguistic levels and do so by imitating each other’s choices of speech sounds, grammatical forms, words and meanings. For example, if Peter says to Mary with reference to their child, I handed John his lunch box today,’ Mary is more likely to respond with And I handed him his coat’ than with And I gave him his coat’ even though the two alternative responses have equivalent meaning.

This lines up with our understanding of how human interaction works. It’s like accents. If you hang around French people for some reason, you will start to sound French. It makes sense that it would happen to some extent for reading – and doomscrolling. Perhaps the medium really is the message, and it’s hacking (apart) our brains.

I’m not sure how to fix that, but here’s one idea.

Litany against phones

I rewatched Dune: Part 2, helped by my wife who requested frequent pauses to explain some arcane facet of Dune-lore. I’ve only read the first three books – the Dune sequence is occasionally and accurately referred to “Diminishing Returns: The Series” or “Stop With The First One” but I’ve read enough fan-wiki summaries to handle the questions. Dune is gloriously dense and weird, and the movies have done a good job of retaining the vast sense of scale and strangeness of the books while shedding some of Old Man Herbert’s unnecessary authorial foibles, like his virulent homophobia.

One of the better things from the books that it’s hard to render into film, though, is the mentally-recited Litany Against Fear, which is exactly what it sounds like.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Not only is it a neat bit of prose, it’s psychologically helpful – this is honestly a pretty good way to deal with anxiety for many: recognise the feeling, but don’t fight it, knowing that it will pass in time. I also like that it’s endlessly adaptable. Modern problems require modern solutions, so here is my version.

“I must not scroll. Smartphones are the mind-killer. TikTok is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will put down my smartphone. I will permit it to pass into a different room. And when it is gone I will turn the inner eye to something else. When the phone has gone, only time will remain.”

Todo

If there is something you need to get done and you feel goofy resorting to the Litany Against Phones, here’s an alternative:

Go back to the early 90s.

1. Turn off your phone notifications except for calls and turn the ringer volume up
2. Put your phone in a different room
3. Plug it in. Tell yourself (about to show my age here) that it’s connected to the wall with a curly cord and you can’t disconnect it until you’ve done the thing you need to do.
4. Do the thing. If the phone rings, and it probably won’t, you’ll hear it.

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Thanks for hanging about. For better or worse, there’s more where this came from.

— Josh

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