I’ve noticed a change in the way we perceive media. A few years ago, media was outside of ourselves, and we noticed it at a distance. We went to the movies and the action, the story, the gestures of the stars took place on a screen. Advertisements existed only in the magazines or on billboards.  But in the last few years this has changed.  We seem to experience media not at a distance, but inside our head.  The screen where the media plays is not at the drive in, but right between our ears.

Technology is one of the items that is driving this.    The computer makes all of our interactions with images, sounds, news, text much more immediate, much closer to where we think.     And, where music is concerned, we can now download what we want and then play what we want through new ear phones that makes us feel that we are inside the music, or, more to the point, the music is inside us.

This is true, too, for other downloads, such as Podcasts.  The voices have moved inside.

I think, too, that the scale of the computer monitor contributes to this increased intimacy with images and sounds.  It is small compared to a movie screen and we have some limited control over it, and the sense of flicking from one thing to another, from one image or one sound to another has an interior quality that is a lot like thinking.

In fact, this movement from the outside to the inside is a lot like one that took place thousands of years ago in religion.   The gods, who previously had existed in the natural world or on a specific site, like Mount Olympus, moved inside the human mind.   It was no longer a matter of Zeus taking his revenge (with earthquakes or floods) but the interior whisper of the snake, of the private tempter, that was causing us such grief.

And, in the modern age, what are the implications of this migration of media?

First, it is far more easy to believe in the illusions we see and hear, just as the modern media, with its appeal to rank emotionalism, makes us more willing to feel it as being genuine.  After all, we experience it from the heart of our existence.

The sad part is this: in the endless quest for the authentic, which youth is particularly mesmerized by, the interior media works with more power than ever before.   I’d like to point out that almost everything that appeals to youth and that makes a young man or woman feel authentic, is a money making operation, and while it seems that fashion, music, nose rings, tattoos and a million other things that make people feel unique are somehow personal, they spring from the oldest impulse of all.  The desire to make money.   And the people who are making money, or using media to make money, are not our friends.  Not by a long shot.

Frankly, I’d like to move the media back about a hundred yards: about to the distance of a drive in movie screen.   At least from that perspective we can distinguish between the observer and the thing being seen.  Right now they are almost the same.

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