You Are What You See

Modern Media Is Misaligned with Truth

Media is like a shimmery mirror. Reality is on the far side, what you read is on the near side, and the media is controlling the middle.

You Are What You See

Code is how machines know what to do. Media is how humans know what to do. If you ran a computer program over your media diet, you could figure out what concepts you are reinforcing through repetition. The program could show “nutritional facts” on your media diet, like you see on your food.

A list of the top thousand keywords to pass through your screen would show you what you are loading into your brain. It might not necessarily be the concepts you want to learn.

If you are what you eat, then you think what you see.

To restate the analogy between your nutritional and information diets: you are rebuilding your body with what you ingest with your mouth and rebuilding your brain with what you ingest with your eyes and ears. Put these two concepts together and you realize what you eat and what you read have enormous power over you.

Whether you agree or disagree with them, the information sources you choose will steer your life and establish your priorities. In a real sense, they are upstream of “you.”

If you could somehow record everything you see and hear, you could determine advertising’s actual effectiveness on you. How many times do you see an ad for Coke before you end up buying one?

We have physiological data that shows the effect of your diet on your metabolism. You can see your glucose spike after eating a cookie. Could we have graphs that show the effect of information diet on neurology? Could we see the dopamine spike after reading a tweet?

With wearable technology, we could detect changes in heart rate or blood pressure from viewing social media. Perhaps if we could see what it’s doing to us, we might use it less.

It may be that humans get addicted to feeling righteous anger just like we get addicted to sugar, alcohol, or nicotine. If we can, social media is a superstimulus we need to identify and consciously limit in our information diets.