TV Is Destroying Your Mind: Tech Judgment

The other day I was listening to a radio program that was exploring mindfulness, and it touched on imagination as an important part of human life. Offhandedly, someone said that’s why radio and books are better than TV: they leave more to the imagination. I have heard this sentiment echoed in a number of places, as well as expanded to say that TV is rotting brains, that kids these days have no imagination, or that technology will destroy humanity. This unsettles me. I’m always put off by negativity towards new technology because every generation seems to think that their new tech will destroy humanity, and yet somehow it never does. Particularly when it comes to things that make our lives easier or are pleasurable for us, people tend to judge very harshly and extend that judgment to the people who partake in the technology. This makes me incredibly sad, because we’ve shown ourselves to be a highly adaptive species that does not lose its curiosity and imagination over hundreds of years, and at the end of the day what this shaming does is tell people they should feel guilty for enjoying themselves.

So I’d like to mount a defense of the ways that TV does engage our mind, curiosity, and imagination, as well as explore how TV pushes us further than books and radio in some ways to show that technology may change what skills we use or focus on, but that does not necessarily mean that it is making us worse.

The first thing I want to mention is fanfiction. This may seem unrelated to whether TV rots our brains or not, but I find it a really good illustration of how TV is often a springboard for other imaginative ventures, and how TV is in many ways on par with if not exceeding books in the ways it inspires further exploration of the characters and themes. Fanfiction requires a great deal of imagination. It involves actively internalizing characters and worlds, then reimagining them in new ways and situations. There is a great deal of fanfiction for TV shows. I have no idea what the ratio of TV to book fanfiction is, but at the very least it illustrates that both of them can inspire imagination on the same level.

If I were to make a guess, I would suggest that TV garners more fanfiction than books. Why? TV is visual. Some people think this means that it makes watchers lazy, but I would argue that it often engages them more deeply than words on the page. We tend to see extreme loyalty to characters or shows when it comes to TV that is far more rare in books. I know that I fall in love with TV characters in a visceral way that I often don’t get when I am reading or listening. Many people then take that emotion and run with it.  We do this in more ways than simply fanfiction, but many of these ways don’t have tangible, measurable results: we fantasize about characters, we imagine what ifs, we bemoan what happened and play if over and over in our heads, we imagine meeting our favorite actors and what we would say to them, we put ourselves into the world and wonder what we’d do. When you see people talking about their favorite show, posting about their favorite show, thinking about their favorite show between episodes, they are using their curiosity and imagination to recreate and reimagine parts of that show. Because of the extended nature of TV, this also happens more with shows than it does with books, which you can just finish reading if you want to know what happens next. Because the visual element of TV often hits us on a more emotional level, it engages us to continue thinking and feeling long after the episode is over.

An additional element of TV that is often missing from books and radio is community. While some books create discussion and group solidarity, or are read with other people, it’s far more common for people to watch TV shows together, live tweet them, talk with their friends about them the next day, or reference them in general conversation. This community provides a beautiful forum for engaging our curiosity, our intellect, our analytical skills, our imagination, and our interpersonal skills in ways that books are not always ideal at. The number of times I’ve seen a group of friends speculate about what would happen next in a show, or dissect the social justice elements of a show, or just talk about what their different interpretations are is astounding, and each of those times the individuals involved were engaging their minds and imagination. I’ve seen this far more around TV shows than I have around books. Anecdotal evidence, but there we are.

As humans we are creative and imaginative beings. We can see this as far back as we have evidence of our culture. While the ways we have expressed these things have changed, we have continued to explore and question and imagine and wonder. Different technologies have helped us do this in different ways, and have engaged different elements of our minds. So why is it that every time a new technology comes along we’re convinced that it’s evil? Is it because it provides people enjoyment? Is it because we don’t understand it? I don’t know, but I will argue that these fears are generally unfounded, and that their end result is more shame in the world. I will always argue against more shame in the world.

TV has positives. Computers have positives. Social media has positives. Books have positives. Each of these things impacts us in different ways by giving us different ways to express ourselves and connect to our world. Each has their downsides. That’s ok. Let’s stop shaming people because we don’t agree with the ways they choose to relax.

 

Dissociation: What Is It, How To Help

Dissociation is a major factor in a number of psychological diagnoses. One of them is Borderline Personality Disorder, something I have at a subclinical level. Dissociation is often overlooked as an element of mental illness though. People rarely discuss it, and unlike “triggers”, it’s not thrown around as an explanation for behaviors. However dissociation is very real and has some serious consequences. It’s also something that many people experience without knowing what to call it or how to deal with it, and it can be debilitating and terrifying. For these reasons, I’d like to give an overview of some of the ways I’ve experienced dissociation, and how I’ve fought back against it.

To read the rest of this post, please visit Aut of Spoons.

 

Monday Morose Miscellany

It’s 11:59. There’s a ringing in her ear. Ring in the new year as they say. Or is it a new day? They’re close enough anyway, and when the minute turns over it will be an ending and she needs that ending like she needs the ringing to drown out the endless voices and start again in silence. It’s silent now, late at night, home alone. She vaguely wonders if she remembered to lock the door, but it’s loud inside, hammering painfully against her skull, making her squirm and look at the clock for the numbers to turn. To end.

 

 

 

Drums.

Arouse a building nausea.

They lost themselves in mind’s recesses and won’t stop echoing.

Sleep

It’s a dream that filters behind the eyes

Celebrated with fireworks, red and gold.

Blink

But not too much or your eyes will get stuck

And you’ll be lost inside your eyelids forever

Empty

Is a wish

For an empty mind and empty body

Filled only with drums.

 

 

 

 

Delicate white branch

Laced with the snowfall of night

Vanished in the sun

 

 

 

She begins with herself, always. In the present tense and first person, she is always the crystal to focus the light of her own mind. A turning inwards, a breath. Who am I today? She wondered, echoing the calls of a thousand young children across the globe. Why today? Came the teenage call, yearning for purpose. When can I rest? She asked, as she suddenly felt her body grow old. She begins with herself but herself is a multitude and she cannot end until she has touched them all. Her crystal has grown diffuse. She cannot see in the gloom.

 

 

 

I’m sitting in a cube

Always in cubes

Open air is foreign, and so I pack my

Spaces into boxes

Filled with boxes

To pretend I take up space.

The boxes are sharp, all straight lines and corners

So I went myself into curves

And ooze into empty places

Hoping the edges don’t cut

I don’t fill the boxes

I can’t feel the boxes alone

It’s easier to pretend I’m not here at all.

Bad People do Good Things

There’s a problem I’ve run into a number of times. I find a piece of art, or writing or media that I really enjoy, and just when I’m set to properly fangirl it, I find out that it’s creator was a douche in some fashion or other. For example a lot of people really love Picasso (he’s not personally my cup of tea) and then they find out he was a misogynistic asshole and they really don’t know what to think anymore. I’ve also seen someone’s entire body of work dismissed for certain bigoted elements of it (Nietzsche was anti-semitic! Everything he says is wrong!).

Now obviously we don’t want to condone things like misogyny or anti-semitism. We probably also don’t want to give money to the people who produce those works, because we also don’t want to support those things. But how do we accept that we might like something created by a problematic individual? CAN we like things that are created by problematic individuals?

Media is a really tough thing when you try to be social justice conscious. There’s almost nothing out there that’s wholly unproblematic, and since everything is created by people, nothing is created by someone who never screws up. I personally can confess to liking a number of shows and books that are racist, sexist, transphobic…all sorts of problematic things. I don’t like those elements of them. I don’t like that when I watch Say Yes to the Dress, it suggests over and over that the most important thing for a woman on her wedding day is to look good. But I still love watching the show. It makes me happy, it makes me excited, it engages me. I have no guilt whatsoever about liking a show about dresses, but I do worry about liking a show that tells women their worth is in their looks.

So how do we react to things like this? Obviously we can’t keep ourselves from all media unless we want to become hermits, or secede and create an all social justice minded media ALL THE TIME (and we’d still have disagreements about what’s acceptable). One extremely important thing that I try to remember is that media is not its creator. I can appreciate Nietzsche’s writings and thoughts without accepting his anti-semitic postures. Obviously he doesn’t get money from me consuming his work, so that’s a much easier one. I can talk about certain elements of Nietzsche and then also mention that I don’t condone anti-semitism. Different facets of individuals can be taken separately.

But what about media that I still enjoy that I still want to consume but that might give money to someone whose views I don’t appreciate? To take an example that’s big for me, Joss Whedon: Whedon does a lot to try to address sexism and to create media that is conscious of gender. However he is not very good at race issues. I LOVE Joss Whedon’s shows. I continue to watch Joss Whedon’s shows. And I’m going to fess up: I should be doing more to let the world know that I think Whedon’s shows should be more race conscious. I should be posting blogs about it. I should be tweeting about it. I should be writing letters to Joss. These are things I should do to help shows that I like get better. These are ways that I can LIKE something and still recognize its problematic aspects.

Something that might be even more important is that BECAUSE I like these shows, I have more of an impetus to push for change on them. Because I like them, I want them to be better. Dr Who is a great example of this: there are lots of diehard fans of the show who have made their opinions known loudly and repeatedly since Steven Moffat took over the show that they are NOT ok with his treatment of women and that they expect better out of their favorite show.

Another important thing to do is just to discuss the different elements of the things that we like. Of course creating something that’s cool or good in one arena does not excuse bigotry in another arena. We can’t tell Oscar Pritorius that it’s cool he shot his girlfriend because he’s done a lot of inspiring work with his disability. But talking about all these interactions is the best way to address them: it’s also a wonderful way for these negative things to be twisted into something more positive. They might force important conversations that we should be having anyway. There is some GREAT critical thinking and writing about a lot of TV and movies today (even academic journals written about Joss Whedon), and pop culture is a great place to jump off for some important conversations about the state of society today.

The last element of this is some self-forgiveness and other-forgiveness. We have to cut ourselves some slack. It’s OK to like something that you recognize is problematic. It doesn’t mean your evil, it doesn’t mean you’re betraying your cause, it doesn’t mean you’re condoning the behavior of whoever might have produced this piece of media. What it DOES mean is that you’re a human being with a variety of interests. We should remember this about other people as well. If you run across someone who likes The Biggest Loser, it might not be a good idea to yell at them about how it causes eating disorders. Asking them what they like about it and then providing some more information about the show and why it’s a little unhealthy might be a better way to approach them. If you run across someone who likes Nietzsche, don’t yell that they’re an anti-semite: ask what they know about Nietzsche himself and whether they’ve thought about some of his problematic personal views as well as some of his interesting philosophical views.

Problematic media is a great way to start discussions, to do some personal thinking, and to try to hold producers accountable. What it shouldn’t be is a great way to shame yourself or others.