In the sixties around the arrival of Television, Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message. This profound statement implied his conviction that the way people received information mattered just as much or even more than the actual information itself. It revealed the silent power of the medium and the various ways it can shape our understanding.
Here are the various messages we absorb from multiple media we are surrounded by today.
Television
- The world is fast.
- Everything in the world is happening all at once.
- It is about appearances.
- Don’t focus on any one thing for long, you can understand the world in short simple statements of 280 characters.
- Interpret and understand the world quickly
- People agreeing with and applauding your short and simple statements matter the most
- Highlights of your life exist to be displayed to other people
- It matters that people positively respond to these carefully selected highlights
- Somebody is your friend if they look at your highlights regularly
- How you look on the outside should matter the most to you
- The world likes, how you look on the outside
Are these implicit messages in the above-mentioned mediums correct /incorrect? Each of us could have our own POV on the same.
In 2015, we as a family decided to cut the cord gradually with the above mediums and that has been one of our best decisions to date.
We turned to the nourishment of books and their implicit messages.
Books (Printed)
- Life is complex and to understand it, one must allocate a reasonable amount of time to deeply think about it.
- There is value in temporarily overlooking the here and now to sharply focus on one thing, chapter after chapter.
- It is worth deeply thinking about how some of the great people lived and how their minds work.
Views expressed are personal and based on keynotes from ‘Stolen Focus’ by Johann Hari.
