Grant Tabler
Ian Reilly
AHSS 1060 Mass Communication
November 10, 2009
The Instant World
We live in an age of digitization. On a daily basis we are assaulted by a flurry of high tech, solutions to all our problems. Usually the message is a simple one; buy our product to better yourself. However, recently there seems to be more products boasting the ability to make your life easier, happier, and better, with little effort on your part. In this respect, society seems to have lost its way, though not just because of technological advancements. Our need to have everything done automatically has led to an instant gratification market. We want things done quickly and easily with as little input from the user as possible, we have become increasingly dependent on automatic solutions, and I believe this has become especially prevalent because of new technology and available media.
With advances in technology, people are able to buy “miracle” products that don’t require any hard work or change in their behaviour. Instead, people can become thin and sexy without all that troublesome diet and exercise business. This is the essence of the instant gratification market. The instant gratification market is predicated on the idea that businesses are able to make large quantities of money by giving people “something for nothing”. In reality however, it is more of a nothing for something relationship. For, although the consumer sees the process as getting results without effort. What is really happening is the business is giving a temporary solution, and getting money out of it. This is only a temporary solution because it is too easy; it does not require the person to change their negative behaviours.
Therefore, when the product runs out, the person will fall back into their old habits. They will then be forced to buy more of the miracle solution, or give in to the fearful torments of hard work. So they create for themselves this tautological paradigm, they become trapped in a costly behavioural loop. People do not recognise this because they are stuck in what the renowned media scholar Marshall McLuhan called, “the rearview-mirror view of their world.”(Playboy 56) The idea that people cannot recognise their current environment until another environment has taken over. So since we are only aware of the environment that proceeded our current one, people are unable to recognise that a change in their behaviour, not the usage of products, is the solution.
This behavioural trend has become ingrained in many aspects of our society’s views. There has been a shift in values. We have developed what I will call an automatic culture, that is, the ideology that we should strive to automate as much of our lives as possible. This way of thinking has become possible due to the advent of technologies that allow and indeed perpetuate it. Things like Google, Wikipedia, and automatic spell-check are similar to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “extensions of the human body and senses” (Playboy 56). In that these knowledge repositories replace our need to remember anything, or spell correctly for that matter. Spell-check in particular has given rise to a generation of semi-literate individuals. Who needs to learn spelling or grammar when my computer can fix it for me? Search engines on the other hand not only eliminate our need to remember anything, but they also take all the work out of research. As Yoda would put it: Books? Interviews? A Google Scholar needs not such things.
This autonomy is not limited merely to the computer; it has afflicted camera technology for quite some time. As Kate Schneider a University of Guelph-Humber professor said, “Digital photography has abstracted us from the process of making images.”(Schneider) She has found that with the advent of digital photography, all the effort has been taken out of the process. Since digital images are instantly rendered there is no longer the excitement of creating the images, it has cheapened the process. Now that the process is instant people are no longer involved, “people are more driven by the breadth of images they make and not the depth of images.” (Schneider) I have found that photography has become less a part of our culture because of this automation. The idea of photography has been trivialized. While more images are being taken, quality and analysis, along with the effort involved, are no longer the medium’s main goal. The goal of digital photography is to simplify the process to the point where no expertise, effort, or knowledge of the medium is required for its use.
This continued simplification of our lives was not brought about solely because of technology. The media we access have also played a part. I do not speak of “direct effects of media upon behaviour”(Gauntlett 1) like in the traditional media effects model. Instead, I refer to a different take on media effects. The idea that media cause us to think a certain way based on the media available, and the way our society chooses to use them. We have gained an inflated sense of self worth from media. We believe that we are special, that somehow what we think and who we are matters to everyone else. This is exemplified by things like Facebook, Blogging, and Twitter. Our society has become a trifle conceited, in that we believe that the rest of the world actually cares about our opinions. What Chuck Klosterman referred to as “America’s insipid Oprah culture—the pervasive belief system that insists everyone’s perspective is valid” (Klosterman 227).
What instant gratification media have allowed us to do is communicate without getting real feedback to these opinions. These new forms of communication have taken the personality out of personal interaction. We are able to post opinions, ideas, or just send messages to others without inflection, body language, or any of the subtle non-verbal nuances of communication. As the media theorist Friedrich Kittler put it, “Writing can store only writing, no more, no less.” (Kittler 7) It has also become much easier to be deceitful for these same reasons. The feedback aspect of these new communication media is non-existent because, although we can instantly send out messages, the conversation is always one way. The other person is never within sight range; you can never see how the message’s recipient feels, nor do you get a true response. For, because there is no physical manifestation, the person is able to edit or filter themselves and their thoughts before responding. There are great masses of people sending out opinions, ideas, and thoughts, yet their conversations are just a series of monologues.
The anonymity of these new transmission methods is a major reinforcement for the instant gratification ideals we have built up. People are able to send out offensive and derogatory statements instantly, and without direct consequence. It fits in with the nature of instant gratification. I can instantly feel better by sending out whatever I want, without consequence or any need to change my behaviour. My ideas are carried across the medium without effort, or any need for thought, as there are no instant or direct consequences. People are venturing into a world in which they will say things that they would not in person, because they have the safety of their medium’s anonymity protecting them.
Media is causing our lives to be simpler and not just with the advent of technologies that transmit messages instantly and easily. Our lives are simpler because since we have brought these technologies into the world, we have fundamentally changed the attitudes and viewpoints of all those that have access to them. We are enabling people to become more impersonal, more egotistical, and sometimes more deceitful. The media are not causing people to become beings driven by autonomy and instant gratification directly. Instead, media like Twitter that are ubiquitous throughout our culture cause us to pursue such ideals because their mere existence changes the way we view the world.
All of these things have a common thread. The world is becoming more digitized, and less humanized. Just like how in photography more images are being taken at the expense of quality and insight. It is also true in new advertisements that people are buying more and more products hoping to somehow achieve their goals, without getting to the root causes. So too in instant transmission media are more messages being sent out, with less and less meaning contained in each. Our digitized culture is moving towards a standard of quantity without meaning. We are now focusing on the breadth of the media disseminated and less on the depth of content therein. Our technology and the media we use, have moved us to a more disconnected and impersonal view of our world. We are entering a world where meaning and humanism are replaced by triviality and digitalization. As Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” quoted Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, “O brave new world that has such people in it.” (Huxley, 144)
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Bibliography
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“Exploiting The Recession: A Mom's Trick to Whiter Teeth.” Consumer Tips Weekly. n.p., n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.
Gauntlett, David. "Ten things wrong with the media ‘effects’ model." Approaches to Audiences – A Reader.
Eds. Roger Dickinson, Ramaswani Harindranath & Olga Linné. London: Arnold, 1998. Print.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1998. Print.
Kittler, Friedrich. “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter”. Stanford University Press, 1999. Print.
Klosterman, Chuck. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.
"Looking Good on a Budget: One Mom's Teeth Whitening Trick." Daily Observer Online. n.p, n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2009.
McLuhan, Marshall. "The Playboy Interview: Marshall Mcluhan." Playboy Magazine. Eric Norden. March 1969. Print.
Schneider, Kate. Personal interview. 5 Nov. 2009.
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