Not another preachy book about Media Nutrition..?
No, wait, let me clarify... it seems a good time to launch a Substack
The body of work around media diet has swelled (people of a dieting persuasion might say ironically!) since 2016, which was roughly 10 years after the first smartphones were launched. This is no coincidence, it’s simply cultural evolution: nearly all of us have screens in our pockets that are connected to each other. In 1996 nearly none of us did. In 2006 many of us had voice phones with basic text capabilities - mostly for adults, not kids.
Most of us probably struggle to remember the details of everyday life before smartphones and screens. Navigation, booking travel or concerts or, well, anything. How did we do it before apps, again? Some of my peers and elders wistfully nostalgise about waiting on phone lines for travel agents or concert booking agents to confirm purchases. They, we, hated it. The nostalgia is simply smug satisfaction at having had the pain og booking anything comprehensively solved by the onset of smartphone apps. Like not having ricketts or other nutrition-deficiency related illnesses any more.
So, this book is not really about that. Except that it is in a way. The cultural evolution of ubiquitously connected screens in our pockets has happened so fast that we are barely able to observe the effects, let alone interpret or mitigate them. The early years of food nutrition had similar effects on culture. Note that I say “food nutrition” not “food consumption” - we’ve been doing the latter quite successfully, in various guises, for a few million years. By “food nutrition” I mean the study of food to figure out how it nourishes us and which foods are better or worse for us, and why. The study of nutrition is surprisingly old - pre-ancient Greek. The successful study of nutrition is surprisingly new - vitamins were discovered in 1913; a link between the top killer of the British imperial military, scurvy, and its simple cure, vitamin C, was only found in 1927, after centuries of research and, in some cases, idiocy.
So, we evolved our food nutrition expertise to the point where even my kids know more about nutrition than most of my generation (X, if you’re interested, don’t judge me!), and most of us are pretty conscious of what we eat. It doesn’t neccessarily make us eat more healthily, but at least we have a decent idea of the consequences of what we feed ourselves. This is emphatically not the case with media.
Most of us do not understand the effects of our media diet. Some of us think we do, so we do a “social media fast” or delete or disable our Facebook profile; or we read left wing and right wing newspapers for balance. We’ve noticed emerging mental health problems in our screen-addicted kids, so we ban iPads at events or negotiate screen time with them. Do any of these work? They typically address symptoms, not causes. They are reactions to a rapidly advancing storm, not considered responses to a change in climate.
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The teaser content for the book - valuable nuggets as well as shiny objects - will be siphoned through this blog Substack publication.