‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ This is title of the famous Pop Art collage by English artist Richard Hamilton from 1956.
In it we see a body builder, a fashion model, a portrait of an unidentified Victorian man , a ‘young romance’ magazine cover, a hoover ad, a TV and a reel to reel tape recorder.
Hamilton’s image playfully mocks the way in which the saturation of media imagery influences the way we make our lifestyle choices.
Sixty years on, the satire looks fairly mild and humorous rather than disturbing. The world wide web has changed everything. TV and dumb magazine advertisements are the least of our worries.
Nowadays, with the information overload, our minds have become more nimble but the major drawback of all the online zapping is that we are rapidly becoming less capable of the kind of critical thinking that makes us unique individuals.
Nowadays, by the time kids reach 18 it is estimated that will have seen 500 hours of advertising spots while they will have spent just 5 thousand hours reading books.
Should we be concerned about this? Derrick de Kerckhove a Canadian born professor and disciple of Marshall McLuhan, thinks so.
The statistics about what he calls the “always-on hyperkids of today” are taken from de Kerckhove’s The Augmented Mind (40k, 2011).
In this short but cogently argued book he details how the rapid transformation of the digital world has re-wired our brains and fundamentally altered our behavior. One consequence of this is that “people are gradually delegating their capacity for imagining things on their own to processes that do their imagining for them”. Continue reading
