I learned a thing in my Anthropology class about the niche. An open niche, in nature, is an unoccupied opportunity for a species to prosper. It could be a habitat that’s uniquely safe from predators, it could be a source of food relatively untapped into, and so forth. If a species can successfully occupy that niche, then they thrive. If they occupy no niche, then they die.
Chimpanzees had occupied a great niche living in trees where they were safe from their enemies and had plenty of food. But the theory of evolution suggests that one day a lot of chimps were forced to find a niche elsewhere living in the grasslands, eventually developing tools for hunting, and over the course of millions of years, turned into the Johns and Janes like you and me in the process.
The most significant change over these millennia was their brain size, which itself created another niche, not for wildlife, but for ideas. In fact, the Human Brain may be the single largest and most diverse niche in the history in the world, its capacity for ideas responsible for the unspeakable variations of culture throughout all the eras and parts of the earth. It created diversity of opportunity, and that’s essentially what a niche is: an opportunity.
But it’s the diversity of that opportunity that’s the tricky part. Diversity doesn’t just create good and productive ideas, but bigoted and asinine ones as well. Without diversity, all the chimpanzees had to do was eat and sleep. And at the start, certainly all we wanted to do was make some better tools and get together some organized hunts, and to have the thought capacity to handle it all. But, whether it was God or Mother Nature, someone instead gave us these brains that are so big, we don’t know what the hell to do with them.
With brains like these, where will our thoughts go after we’ve conquered eating and sleeping? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs says that once we’ve achieved needs of Survival and Safety, we then move on to needs of Belonging and Self Actualization. So once we have a job that’ll pay the bills, the next thing we worry about is having a feeling of accomplishment, which must not have been hard to do before the Industrial Age. Every product had to be made from scratch, and the same worker probably saw most products in their development from beginning to end. So for many workers, it was easy to feel a sense of pride in what they were making.
It was the Industrial Age that took it way. Stuart Ewen, from his 1976 book Captains of Consciousness suggested that once Industrialization and Assembly Line Processing took the creativity away from work, the working class were robbed of their fulfillment of individualization. Classical Management, to twist the knife, left the few people running the company to make all of the decisions for the employees devoted to their specialized tasks without any room for craftsmanship.
Their placement on the Hierarchy of Needs was left empty, and was waiting to be filled by something else. This is what I mean by the Brain being a niche: there was an open opportunity for fulfillment in peoples’ minds, and in a variety of forms, it would be filled by the media
Ewen described how the development of advertising in the 1920s had attempted to fulfill our need for individualism with material wealth. As an example, Ewen cited a humorously ill-conceived magazine add for an “Alpine Sun Lamp” that promised the joys of ultraviolet rays in the comfort of your own home (by then, the constraints of industrialization and city life were recognized for being at odds with the joys of nature.)
Silly products like the Alpine Sun Lamp promised sensations in place of genuine realities, similar to how cars have long been advertised with images of care-free drivers traveling through grassy prairies. Cars embodied the escape fantasy, but most only use it to drive between their entrapment at work and their entrapment at home. Of all the goods in the product market, the vast majority was mundane, but the advertising industry manipulated them into the sensations and expressions that the peoples’ dulled senses were craving.
But advertising wasn’t the only thing turning mundane objects into expressive ones. The culture itself was creating fashions to achieve individualization. Or, well, fashion had existed long before the Industrial Revolution, but afterwards it was needed far more in a growing crisis of self expression.
Edward Sapir analyzed the nature of fashion and noted on how the clothes we wear are used as a safe rebellion; as a means of disassociating ourselves with the monotony of culture without necessarily offending the values of that culture. Sapir stated how people over the ages have criticized in vain against fashion for being an attack against modesty. And they were right in saying so, but it will never diminish fashion because, as Sapir noted, fashion serves a paradoxical need that people have to be modest and immodest at the same time.
The media, essentially, has catered to that niche for fulfillment in our brains with stories of rebellion and escape fantasies in television and movies. Through watching fictional accounts of the like, we have felt all the sensations of attacking the system without ever having to disrupt it. As it were, we tend to be filled with many a paradoxical need, as we seem keen to contradict ourselves in our many efforts to reach Self Actualization.
Adorno and Horkheimer made scathing criticisms of the entertainment industry for being a superficial imitation of genuine artistic expression. By virtue of being run by an industry, they stated how any signs of spontaneity in films were deceptive, and by contrast, all forms of expression and art were monitored carefully by studios who all approved the personnel and talent. Campaigns that boasted what talent were involved in a film, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested, were substitute arguments for actual quality of the film.
They were awfully mean things to say about the movies, but they had a point. Adorno and Horkheimer feared a future where consumers will regularly accept superficial quality from a capitalist market that feeds them a superficial interpretation of reality. That’s not too far off from the voting public being fed images of a prosperous America instead of solid evidence to believe in a political candidate. The human race, in a self-contradictory manner, is somehow willing to accept the image of quality over quality itself.
It’s weird, because certainly we want what’s best for ourselves, but with the market of our needs in the hands of the media, we are somehow left with knockoffs and manipulations a lot of the time. So is that the media’s fault? In their competition with one another to get our attention, perhaps they tend to gravitate towards whatever we’ll respond to first, so maybe they can only be blamed for catering to our human nature, and it’s our human nature that’s riddled with self contradictions.
Naomi Klein, for instance, in her lecture at Sydney that was transcribed by The Media Report, discussed how many people tend to put more value in brand names and logos than in the literal quality of the products they purchase. Right there is an example of the media succumbing to tactics of familiarity in place of building a case for why we should purchase their products. The contradiction that we tend to be guilty of is that, as consumers, we tend to settle for what appears to work just as well as what we may genuinely want. Klein expressed concerns for a public that not only accepted brand names in place of quality, but also got attached to their familiarity, creating surrogate relationships with the products they were so used to, as though they were settling for convenience and getting sucked into them as habit.
Virginia Postrel, from her article Consumer Vertigo published in Reason Magazine, also addressed the concern for consumers siding with convenience over informed choice. Her arguments were more of a rebuttal against criticisms over the overwhelming variety that the public has, not just with flavors of cheese and sizes of jeans, but where to live and what career paths to take. Critics had speculated that consumers are stranded to agonize over their decisions, but Postrel argued that they don’t have to when they need only arrive at decisions that will satisfice.
But it’s an interesting concern that people, once again, contradict themselves when they would theoretically agree that variety is a good thing, but instead return to buying the same brands that they’re used to over the other varieties competing for their attention. But Postrel certainly argues in favor of variety, and I guess I agree with her, not just on consumerism, on the Human Mind. Life wouldn’t be much fun if we lived in trees and only thought about eating and sleeping. But with this diversity of thought came a heaping bag of complication.
That’s the way that diversity tends to work out. It’s a good thing only because good consequences are among the possible outcomes. Bad and counterproductive outcomes are also just as possible. A nation run by democracy is great when it allows all men to be created equal, but when progress in office is muddled by interest groups and elected officials are exposed for scandals, then you’d have to admit that totalitarianism would get things done faster, whether or not for the better.
The Internet is a provocative example of the ups and downs of diversity. It is, on one hand, celebrated as the flag ship of the Information Age, allowing endless possibilities for publishing and storing information, conducting business and for communicating instantly across endless distances. Any kind of information can be stored on the Internet, and any kind of conduct can be exercised between communicators. And that includes asinine statements and an assortment of scams.
Even the good and useful storage of information on the Internet is seen as a conundrum by Nicholas Carr in his article Is Google Making us Stupid?, published in The Atlantic. The diversity, he says, began for him as an excellent means for doing quick research, but soon afterward realized that hopping from site to site had lazed his attention span for single readings.
It would seem that the Human Brain, in all its diversity, can only handle committing itself to a few things at a time. When exposed to too much, its senses become dulled. It’s a similar concern that Thomas de Zengotita had in his article The Numbing of the American Mind. He was concerned that the overexposure of a diversity of sensations by the media left the public numbed to them.
So many emotions are presented to us in the news and advertising and entertainment. Many we ignore, but we’re also effectively provoked by many of them before moving on to the next thing. It was Zengotita’s explanation for why the American Public moved on so quickly after the events of September 11th. Provoking and real though it was, our short emotional attention spans could not sustain interest for longer than six months before directing our attentions back to the labored and artificial sensations offered to us by the quick moving media.
In the tradition of the Be Careful What You Wish For sort of moral, there tends to be some unforeseen consequences to what you would think would be a good thing for the Human Mind. And it seems like it refuses to be satisfied. Expand its size and lift its restrictions and it won’t know what to think. Offer it choices and opportunity, and it won’t know where to start. Point it in specialized directions and then it can’t think for itself.
The Mind seems to be a conundrum where if you solve one problem, then you create another. Therein lies again, a problem that comes with diversity. There will always be problems. Therefore, when the media tries to fill the niches of the Mind’s needs, there are consequences. The Internet has allowed people to expose themselves to an audience of friends and strangers, and people might fulfill a need to have their voices a little more heard over a social network, but even that comes with consequences.
Elliot Gould, in her essay Exposed, published in The New York Times Magazine, spoke about how her blog started out as enjoyable outlet for her thoughts and feelings dissolved into a destructive exposure of personal information about herself and her loved ones. One thing that I can give Emily Gould credit for is her ability to write about her experiences in activities that I inherently hate—gossip journalism, vanity blogging—in a manner so well spoken and articulate that I could read it feeling complete empathy for what she went through, and all the while never remembering that I hate everything she does.
Tabloids on celebrity gossip are something I so despise. It’s the type of superficial reporting events that I don’t think the culture had any business of knowing—the latest scandal of some pop star; the latest breakup of a celebrity couple. It’s the type of thing that panders to a public uninterested in genuine facts or quality that makes me worry if Adorno and Horkheimer’s fears had come true.
The worst part about celebrity gossip and the media that reports it is that reporters and consumers alike superimpose drama-queen-esque emotions over the events that it reports whether they’re there or not. It’s the same criticism that I could make for narcissistic blog writing. People sitting at home updating their web pages may be sensationalizing the events that have happened in their lives when they may not really want to find an outlet for their emotions, but they want rather to garner attention. Another credit that I can give for Gould was the sense of shame she expressed when her blog writing had nearly ruined her life.
Personally, I embrace the Internet and the Information Age. I love the concept of Facebook and being able to tell web patrons things about yourself that they otherwise may not have had a chance to find out. The web has had an effect on filling that niche in our brains and the media that caters to it like nothing else before. But that contradiction kicks in somehow on the web, in the form of what Gould called “oversharring,” when our need to display ourselves is blurred in the desire to completely expose ourselves to vanity.
And it’s the diversity of our minds that creates the problems that allow us to contradict ourselves like this. One of my professors had told me about a book that compiled innumerable different theories of how the mind worked from different scientists, doctors, psychiatrists and otherwise, but the kicker is that virtually none of the theories overlapped each other. The mind is so diverse, so complex, that we can hardly begin to figure how it works, and for solving problems such as achieving Self Actualization, there are unspeakable numbers of ways to get there, also diverse and complex.
We contradict ourselves because there are so many different ways of achieving what we would consider the same thing. Ewen says we seek individuality, but we may instead settle for materialism. Sapir says we seek expression, but instead find safety and acceptance. Adorno and Horkheimer say we merely seek entertainment, and unwittingly get entangled in deception and superficiality. Postrel and Carr said we look for variety, but settle for predictability and convenience. Gould says we seek recognition and friendship, but may indulge in vanity. The Information Age is fantastic, but it’s overwhelming us. We’ve constructed this vortex of information and culture and media, and it’s all because our minds weren’t content to just eating and sleeping. So how are we expected to deal with it all?
The simple answer would be to know what you put in your Mind and know that you can handle it. My favorite defense out of all the critics that I’ve read from is Postrel’s, because she knows to refer to the Brain as something that belongs to you and that you’re in control of it. Many of the others wrote of the effects of media as a something that we have to be worried about, but Postrel understood that we’re responsible for ourselves and what we choose to consume from the media. It’s a chaotic world out there in the Information Age, no doubt, and my Mind may never be at rest searching for ways to fulfill its needs, but it’s certainly a lot more fun than living in a tree.
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