Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung of New Braunfels, Texas March 11-12, 2023
In the 18th. century the famous French author, Jean Jacques Rousseau, published his Confessions. His goal was a noble one: to give a full account of himself as a unique human being. His work may comprise a moment in history where our current blurring of fact and fiction began. He wrote that while he wished to stay with the facts of his life--but “if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has been only to fill a void due to a defect of memory. . . . I have bared my secret soul. . ..”
When I read his autobiography, I found it impossible to tell where these “embellishments” appeared. His medium was the printed page. Since then, the delivery systems we turn to today are often social media outlets. Media guru Marshall McLuhan announced decades ago that media are not just channels of information. They also “shape the process of thought,” as Nicholas Carr reminds us in his 2011 study, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.
There is a further consequence that Carr tracks in his study: the “Net. . . is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” Both activities, we know, require time, a slowness, to absorb the content through reflection. The electronic speed of our social media channels diminishes, if not annuls, these human faculties.
One of his colleagues, who writes about the use of computers, admitted to Carr that he had lost the ability “to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print.” This atrophied capacity seems to be one of our most epidemic maladies today: the inability to even read most writing of any length, much less to reflect on its meaning. This withering of attentiveness may be a global virus, but it is gaining greater omnipresence in our culture.
A recent Atlantic article in this month’s issue by Megan Garber, a staff writer, is titled “We’re Already in the Metaverse.” Her research is both astonishing and not a little unnerving. Garber’s byline gives summarizes of her argument. In the metaverse “Reality is blurred. Boredom is intolerable. And everything is entertainment."
Entertainment is not an evil. My wife and I gravitate to it regularly, watching documentaries, movies, or specials on cultural topics. But we don’t deploy it full time nor take up residency in this habitat of diversion. It is not a substitute for being in touch with a common reality and participate in its making. Garber points to the metaverse’s toxicity: “Dwell in this environment long enough, and it becomes difficult to process the facts of the world through anything except entertainment.”
How often do we see the declaration in what we view or read: “Based on a true story.” Fair enough. So what part is true, which fiction? Shades of Rousseau’s Confessions skips across centuries to signal an alert. The blurred boundaries have led us to a world in which the fantasies of some event, the fictionalizing of it, now often replaces any allegiance to historical facticity. This replacement is compounded when we notice how often someone’s way of processing information is stunted, shallow, nonreflective and scattered. Individuals may find themselves existing as regular residents of a fractured world.
When Garber offered several titles to watch that reflect this new fashioning of facts and history, my wife and I chose Gaslit. It is a fascinating and entertaining series on the Watergate break-in of the 1970s. But we continued to ask ourselves: How much of what we are viewing reflects the reality of that event, and what is engineered entertainment filler? We could not tell.
In a democracy, weakening the sense of a shared reality through entertainment’s portal can be dangerous and divisive for all of us.