Will Our All Connected Multimedia Make Us Ill?

Will our all connected, all instantaneous, multimedia capacity make us ill?

I see a great deal of media stuff about loneliness and the problems of loneliness but nothing about the detrimental effects of our overwhelming intrusive “society.” We are being encouraged to share every moment of our lives, with “selfie” pictures and with social media posts. Some do not seem able to spend five minutes without telling the world what they are doing.

Our lives are a constantly and incessantly bombarded with input. Every possible pressure is applied to make us all, especially the young, accept an ever-increasing load of inputs. Television is now not just in the sitting room while we relax, it is now on mobile equipment and everyone is expected to update the most trivial of stuff constantly. We are led to believe we can only be friends with a person if we are in constant communication with them. Everything has to be instant. The idea of composing a thoughtful letter, taking several days to compose it, and sending it by post is fast becoming thought of as something from history. Then the idea that we should think through a chain of consequences before offering our replies to any proposal, is also viewed as undesirable. It is certainly undesirable to those who wish us to make rapid buying decisions and never think about the actual merits of the product being sold.

The obvious motive for the media professionals is the ability to advertise products, to individuals, 24 hours a day. The fostering of instant replies, to any message, has the objective of preventing detailed study of the offer being made.

This constant pressure to accept non-stop data inputs, usually meaningless trivia, is removing objectivity and environmental awareness. We see people walking in parks with ears covered by headphones and eyes glued to small electronic screens. They would not know if the park was filled with butterflies or rubbish.

I understand that some people have serious problems because of being detached and without interaction with other humans and so they become physically, emotionally or mentally ill. But we need time alone, time of peace, time to escape this avalanche of media demanding our attention and acceptance. We all need a time out.

We all need time alone to enter our own “mind-self,” to meditate, to relax. We all need time alone in order to balance out all the demands constant sociability imposes on us. We need time to think without interruption, without pressure to reach any conclusion in the shortest possible time. Without this time out, we will all become driven to overhasty decisions and become damaged as a result without time alone we just react to the latest bit of data without thought for the consequences. This may be just what the manipulators of mass gestalt are trying to achieve but we do not have to help them. Every action becomes simply a reaction to the overload of input that we are trying to cope with.

In our modern, high-speed, all interconnected lifestyle, we are at great risk of becoming dependent, almost addicted, to having every moment filled with some form of sensory stimulation. Propaganda is as old as human communication but these days the manipulators do not need to formulate elaborate fabrications, they just need to fill the minds with constantly changing information, so that nothing gets chance to take root. Nothing gets contemplated or thought through.

Will all this incessant and continuous need to process information actually make us ill? Even our computers can crash when overloaded and so it seems plausible that humans will suffer as well.