The Digital Storm: Blowing Away the Human Mind By John Stanton
“Temporal compression, as it is technically called, is an event that concretely modifies everyone’s daily life at the
same time. In the face of this acceleration of daily life, fear has become an environment even in a time of peace. We
are living in the accident of the globe, the accident of instantaneous simultaneity and interactivity that have now
gained the upper hand over ordinary activities…With the phenomena of instantaneous interaction that are now our lot,
there has been a veritable reversal, destabilizing the relationship of human interactions and the time reserved for
reflection in favor of the conditioned responses produced by emotion… Promoting progress means that we are always
behind: on the high-speed Internet, on our Facebook profile, on our email inbox. There are always updates to be made: we
are the objects of daily masochism and under constant tension.” The Administration of Fear, Paul Virillio
The electromagnetic/digital storm emanating from television, computer and cell phone screens flood the neural pathways
of the brain drowning synapses. The ferocious digital winds from the storm twist and rattle axons, neurons and dendrites
like the winds from a powerful thunderstorm that shears leaves off of trees and bends branches to and fro. The lightning
strikes from this digital storm randomly sever connections in the cerebral cortex, just as a lightning strike violently
amputates the limbs from a tree. And, at times, the electromagnetic field and its constituents, now having translated
itself into images, sounds and text, crash into the cerebral cortex send shock waves through the entire structure of the
brain down to the base of the spinal cord. The cerebral cortex has been trashed.
The New Cocaine?
The digital storm, though ultimately damaging, is stimulating. It rushes to find the nucleus accumbens and floods it
with dopamine which the hippocampus, in turn, ‘memorizes’ as rapid stimulus for satisfaction or pleasure. The amygdala
then ‘records’ the event making sure that the human response is ‘conditioned’ to find pleasure and, indeed, seek it out
desperately. The brain reboots itself and in so doing its human face. Addiction ensues and brains/humans change.
The digital storm forms a ‘new brain’ and, hence, human character. Transmogrification becomes complete. Perhaps it’s all
evolution’s plan. But interesting symptoms appear indicating this could be devolution.
The addiction to the digital storm is so overwhelming that the brain creates a punishing craving mechanism: connection
insecurity. Its emotion is fear, the fear of not being connected, or being seen, or taking part in the social scene.
It’s the fear of missing out on the daily on-line world and being MIA to comment on the latest incidental text, image or
sound. To eliminate connection insecurity the brain creates an addiction that resembles the cocaine addict’s frenzied
search for more having snorted up the buy and the stash.
Don’t See Me, Touch Me, Read Me
You can see it in the mothers and fathers that push their infant children down the sidewalk talking into the cell-phone
rather than talking to the child. What does that child store in the brain? Gossip? Recipes? Sports trivia?
Or at the family dinner table where adults and children feel compelled to check email or take calls not wishing to be
offline for 60 minutes at Sunday dinner. Worse still, the dinner hosts have to remind the cell-phone users to ‘please
silence your cell-phones’ as if in the movie theater.
And walking down the street, the ability to say ‘good morning or good evening’ has been eroded as everyone seems to be
working a conversation via the cell-phone or looking down at email. It’s a world of people walking with their heads-down
on the street. It’s heads-down in elevators, offices and even in church pews on Sunday.
The brain’s pause and contemplative thought functions have been degraded and exist like abandoned and rusty rail road
tracks. The brain has replaced these two elements with a reflexive response mechanism from the unconscious and
unfiltered mind.
Such is the mind of the President of the United States, Donald Trump and his penchant for Twitter, television and
newspapers. His thinking, like the bulk of the American citizenry, is limited to 150 characters a thought. Producing 150
characters is an exhaustive effort for most these days. No doubt, a student has been assigned to describe the novel War
and Peace in 150 characters. Tell us what is unique about your life in 150 characters, they’ll ask.
And don’t dare write an article of more than 500-750 words on a subject, because ‘readers’ will not stick with it, they
say. ‘Give me all bullet points, our President says.
When in falling asleep, or in your dreams, you ‘see’ text scrolling vertically / horizontally (and you can read some of
it) or you observe images of computer screens with data displayed (which you can interpret) your brain and you have been
altered. And when you notice that these images start to appear in your recurring dreams and it seems to be altering your
deepest consciousness, it’s probably time to seek shelter from the digital storm. Think about it, if you can.
“’She watches with the raptor’s eye, trained on distance as she is, and dark---so when she turns to what is close, so
intimate and huge, she keeps the gift of sight beyond herself, neither sentimental or detached….’Who, indeed, watches
the passing show with the raptor’s eye? Couple the quick tweet and modalities of social networking with the videoing and
blogging obsession, immersion in video games, overtime on the Internet and the constant interruption of face to face
interaction by the cell phone, and you have a recipe for attention deficit in the life world. What are educational
institutions to do in the culture of online engrossment and the fast electronic update? The humanities might
rearticulate its worth in a climate of unexamined absorption.” A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, Barbara Stafford
John Stanton can be reached at jstantonarchangel@gmail.com. He lives in Virginia.