(2025-02-12) Edet The Digital Spectacle And Its Unseen Effects

Cyril Edet: The Digital Spectacle and Its Unseen Effects. The internet used to be a place you could go to. It was like a room on your desktop. And this room had different things you could pick up, look at, and put down. You could step out of it whenever you wanted.

Eventually, the room got bigger. It became a house, with many rooms. Corporations begged us to move into this house.
“It’s free!”, they said.

“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception.” - from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) written by Marshall McLuhan

Social media is an active process. It acts upon you, and invisibly conditions you.

We learned this too. We advertise ourselves everyday online. How smart we are, how sexy

Corporations waited to achieve critical mass on platforms, then they began heavy advertising

Corporations advertise online to accumulate capital, and we do as well. Everything flows in the direction of capital.

We advertise how smart, cool and sexy we are to gain cultural & social capital. All with the hopes of turning that into financial capital. Why?

how cool. We know that we do this, but a lot of us don’t really think about it. Yet you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The Triad of Capital by Sean Monahan

Everything flows in the direction of capital.

One day, we all woke up, and the walls of our house were covered in shit (read: ads)

Recently I’ve been thinking about how much I’m beginning to hate LinkedIn and Instagram, and the internet at large.

So, we obliged

I started by talking about social media as an environment, now let’s talk about that in relation to anti-environments.

Conscious vs Unconscious Perception

Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay between the old and the new environments creates many problems and confusions. - from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967) written by Marshall McLuhan

To understand the “anti-environment”, I’ll give you an example. This essay is an anti-environment. I don’t want you comfortable while reading this, I want you sat up and engaged. I want you to think

Let’s go further. I think that the difference between the environment and anti-environment is the ratio of active engagement between you and the technology or medium

Which of the two does this largely skew towards?

Media, by altering the environment, evoke us in unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act - the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change” - from The Medium is the Massage

The final word on this section I’ll leave to Frank Herbert:
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there’s the real danger." - from God Emperor of Dune (1976) written by Frank Herbert

Experience Flattening

My solution to this has been to turn off notification sounds for social media apps, while leaving them on for text messages. Now I have different sensory experiences that inform my perception.

Now let me articulate our problem. Like McLuhan said, media will always inform the way we think and act. That is a given. What we should be striving for, is surrounding ourselves with media that we can trust to not negatively skew the way we view the world, when we don’t have the time to be actively engaged.

The Medium is the Message

A new technology or medium always provides us with a new way of engaging with the world.

the jet plane transformed our attitude towards time and space due to the ease with which we could now travel across much larger distances, in much shorter times.

A medium usually represents or extends reality. I’ll give a common example that we all know: notifications.

“The problem that we have is that the way the apps are laid out and prioritised is flat. You will get a notification about someone you’ve never met in your life, liking a photo you posted 3 weeks ago with the same tenacity/priority as a text message from your mum

A more pointed example is how digital media transformed our attitude towards entertainment. When someone is on their phone, they’re not so much looking at it as they are looking through it, at more interesting or important parts of the world.1
What this implicitly says is that whatever is on your screen is more interesting or important than the world in front of you.

Our attitude towards entertainment has been transformed in the sense that since we can now be constantly entertained by our phones, we place less emphasis on creating entertaining scenarios in our physical environment. Why?
Because the former is easier

The Way Forward: New (Physical) Institutions

To explain the effects of social/digital media on us, I’ll use Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad of Media Effects:

The purpose of this essay is to highlight the issues with our current mode of engaging with our lives. Social media is failing us, because it has been designed to do so.

we can use it to better facilitate physical experiences, rather than to avoid them. How can we do this? (IRL)

Start hosting your friends at home! Host dinner parties, potlucks, or any general gatherings with your friends.
Talk. Talk to strangers. Make new friends. Talk about what you like that you’ve seen online. Talk about what you dislike. Talk about the things you feel are missing in your city. A type of event? A type of social space? A certain way of thinking? What can you do about that?

My partner was telling me about how it’s much more difficult to find distinguishable artistic movements now (such as Art Deco, Bauhaus etc). I think this is due in part to the fading practice of group organisation around a set of principles. We need to build new institutions, and build new movements.

What is the ideal vision you have for your city? What skills do you have that enable you to play a part in moving towards that? Which of your friends also have those skills? How can you organise?

Imagine how much more exciting your life would be if you, your friends, and their friends spent time trying to better your immediate surroundings. The conversations you’d have, the fullness of interaction.

It’s important to have similar, intersecting points of reference. What philosophers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, politicians etc. do you like? What parts of their ethos do you agree with? Tell your friends about them.