Dear Friends,
The magic of writing is to both step inside of your mind to articulate your thoughts and feelings while stepping outside of yourself to consider your point of view from the reader’s perspective.1
For thousands of years, text and drawing were the only ways to transmit culture across time and space. Then in 1877, the phonograph came along capturing voice. Then radio, television, social media … and soon, virtual worlds built by AI in virtual reality glasses.
This week’s newsletter started as a stupid explanation as to why I deleted Instagram, re-installed it, and then deleted it again. Then it morphed into something bigger and weirder: an exploration of how the media technologies we use — the “water we swim in” — alter our psychology. It won’t be for everyone, but if you feel like technology is breaking your mind and making you anxious, maybe you’ll vibe. Okay, here goes.
L.M. Sacasas thinks that Apple’s new Vision Pro headset is dystopian, and I agree. Or at least I did when I first read his reflection. He fears that future versions of VR glasses will become too good, too irresistible:
Increasingly captivated by virtual worlds, I am less likely to demand anything more or better. The tools that diminish my capacity to experience the world in full simultaneously promise to give me a better-than-real world.
Isn’t it more satisfying, he suggests, to experience the joy of an infant’s laugh or the smell of a pine forest than some fantasy world in an isolated headset? Sure, but when I go to the park I don’t see the parents at the playground delighting in their children’s play or connecting with the trees. They’re staring at their cell phones. Paying attention to the world around us is hard, and mostly we try to escape it.
Yes, virtual reality headsets will give a “better-than-real world” while distracting us from the real world around us. Isn’t the same true of novels, TV shows, and video games?
Did you know that avid readers are better at recalling names while TV-watchers are better at recognizing faces? Makes sense, right?2
I first learned about this research from Joseph Henrich’s book, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. One of my favorite nonfiction books, it’s full of research about how culture shapes psychology. But if I had to boil it down to just two sentences: First, Westerners are less loyal to our tribe (extended family) and more concerned with fairness.3 Second, Westerners are less attentive to the moment, as we spend more time thinking about the past and future.
Henrich blames the printing press for our poor facial recognition. The Gutenberg Press turbocharged literacy rates in Europe:
With widespread literacy came meta-cognition —the process of thinking about one's own thinking. Try to imagine life without reading and writing. It’s nearly impossible. In his 1982 classic, Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong observed that:
Fully literate persons can only with great difficulty imagine what a culture with no knowledge whatsoever of writing or even of the possibility of writing. Try to imagine a culture where no one has ever ‘looked up' anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression ‘to look up something' is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning.
With literacy, we stepped outside of ourselves. We time-traveled, recalling from the past and projecting into the future. We became worse at recognizing the face in front of us, but better at considering the world from their point of view. We discovered the depths of our interiority.
Orality improvises, responding to its audience, while writing is detached from an invisible audience unbound by time and distance. Orality is embodied with gestures, tone, and expression. The writer, by contrast, is disembodied to the reader.
Text gravitates toward ideas and motives; speech celebrates stories and heroes. Text accumulates: speech evaporates. Text standardizes, speech customizes.
With literacy, we no longer were mere subjects experiencing life going by around us. We became someone else’s object, a part of their subjective experience. We started to see ourselves through their eyes.4
In addition to experiencing life, writers wonder, how would I describe this? How does it relate to what I’ve written in the past? How will I look back at it in the future? Oral culture, by contrast, is Zen-like focused on the present without the distractions of the past, future, or others’ perspectives.
At least, that’s how Walter Ong described the differences between orality and literacy in 1982 — thirty years before Instagram.
When we left Berkeley in November, I took a 10-week break from Instagram. I wanted to focus on the places and the people around me. I didn’t want to “perform” my new life in Oaxaca for a foreign audience of friends back home. I didn’t want to explore new places through the algorithm’s feed of the most Instagrammable backdrops.
Then a couple of weeks ago, while attending a wedding, I re-installed the app. It was a way to learn more about the other attendees and to see each day’s events through their eyes.
What a mind-fuck. I was constantly aware of a second layer of altered reality floating above us. Wherever we were — walking down Cartagena’s 16th-century streets, holding on for dear life in a speed boat, chatting in a bar, swimming in the turquoise sea — there were dozens of versions of the same experience, recorded, edited, and uploaded to Instagram.5
If reading and writing nudge me to consider the world from other perspectives, watching Instagram clips from other perspectives paradoxically nudged me to focus more on myself. How did I look, sound, and act? Was I having fun? Were others having more fun? Is that really how I dance? Oops, did I have too much to drink?
After my two-month hiatus from Instagram, I realized that Daisy Jones was right: “Real life ended up being weirder than The Truman Show.” We really are living in a 24/7 reality TV show whether we choose to or not.
Walter Ong wrote his masterpiece describing the differences between oral and textual culture 550 years after the invention of the Gutenberg Press. It hasn’t even been 15 years since the launch of Instagram, and less than 8 years since TikTok and Instagram Stories/Reels turned our lives into The Truman Show. We still don’t know all the ways they are affecting our culture and psychology, but we know that they are.
While at the wedding, Apple released its VR headset. Instead of experiencing reality, we strap on our goggles to experience virtual and augmented reality:
Despite some skepticism about its price and the dystopia of its premise, most thoughtful reviewers like Stephen Fry and Tim Urban couldn’t help but exclaim its magic. Here’s Kevin Roose from the New York Times:
I was primed for skepticism going into my demo … but there were several moments while wearing the Vision Pro when I felt genuine wonder, and a feeling of being present for what could turn out to be a major shift in computing.
The photos and videos in Apple’s demo — which included a scene from a kid’s birthday party, a video of a mom making bubbles for her daughter and a family gathered around a kitchen table — were gorgeous, and the depth added by the 3-D camera made them uncannily realistic. To my eyes, it felt no different from being part of the scene myself. I got a lump in my throat thinking about rewatching my son’s first steps this way years from now.
Iris is visually oriented whereas I’m all words. She never forgets a face, I never forget a name. She studied design and genuinely enjoys Instagram; I studied humanities and love Substack. So I’m on team text, but I’m not convinced that there is anything better about books than Instagram, even if they each affect our psychology differently. Either way, we’re escaping reality to immerse ourselves in something else. And so, we must each answer how we want to escape — and recognize that each format will change us in different ways. I wish I were better at recognizing faces, but it’s not gonna keep me from reading books and Substack.
A middle-aged woman recently told me about her 17-year-old son with cerebral palsy. She’s from a rural village in Oaxaca where maternal and child mortality rates are infamously high. Her son struggles to communicate and refuses physical therapy. In 2021, the Mexican government extended a cash transfer program to families with children with disabilities and she now receives $200 deposited into a state-issued ATM card every two months. It’s enough money to buy her son a smartphone and a data package so that he can spend his days on TikTok and surfing the web. If ten years from now, he’s able to strap on a VR headset and explore fantastical worlds, I’d be thrilled for him.
Anaïs Nin wrote that “we write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”Writing makes me feel calm, collected, and clear-headed. Instagram makes me feel chaotic, anxious, and overwhelmed. But I haven’t ruled it out completely. How will VR make me feel? I dunno, but at some point I’ll give it a shot.
What about you? Why do we say we that want to read, but end up spending time on social media? What’s your theory on why our brains don’t follow our intentions?
Yours,
David
In last week’s newsletter, I described the experience of teaching mixed media workshops to young Colombian library users in 2007:
They experienced the transcendence of writing: considering one’s own experiences through the eyes of an invisible audience.
Most of the nerds I know (and I am one) suck at recognizing faces. Matt Yglesias, one of the best-read nerds on the internet, has described his total lack of visual memory. One of the ways Iris and I complement each other is that she recognizes the faces and I remember their names.
How did we stray from tribal loyalty? Henrich blames the Roman Catholic Church. 1,000 years ago the Vatican banned polygamy and cousin marriage. It also discouraged divorce, adoption, and arranged marriages — the so-called kin-based institutions that elevate the tribe above the atomic family. By weakening the influence of Europe’s tribes, the Vatican could more easily spread the teachings of the Bible, including fairness: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” (Matthew 7:12)
My hunch is that this part seeing ourselves through others’ eyes is the biggest culprit of increased anxiety — supercharged by social media.
The first widespread use of Twitter was as a “backchannel” at conferences, where attendees commented in real time to whatever the speaker was saying. It was touted as a democratizing force; no longer was it a silent audience receiving the expert's authoritative views. But things quickly got out of hand, as Danah Boyd described back in 2009.
Around 2014 my cellphone was stolen and I decided not to purchase another one. 10 (happy) months passed until I got another one. I realized I did not really need to be "connected" 100% of the time, it not even affected my job. My friends were the most upset that I was not easily reachable, but I really enjoyed that time. I'd love to have that kind of break once again.
On the other hand I love Instagram. I love the illusion of being close to people I care about but live far away (like you) that it gives. In some sense, oversharing ones lives on social media is a gift to people that loves you. We get to glimpse our friend's happy moments, what they're reading, what they're caring about. I thinks there is beauty in that.
“but if you feel like technology is breaking your mind and making you anxious, maybe you’ll vibe.” Yes.
I did a six week hiatus and the first thing I noticed is more comfort to add future guardrails to my social media use. But here’s the truth: I still looked at screens. I watched documentaries, I edited way more photos in less time, I watched YouTube videos about film formats, and I looked at a lot of articles about photography greats on my computer. My screen time didn’t diminish at all but IG anxiety was quelled. I think social media’s ability to keep us fixed in a state of stupor is part of its detrimental qualities. I paused documentaries or videos on YouTube when I got tired. I didn’t have an urge to overshare. I felt calmer consuming other media. Even now that I rejoined, I feel calmer because I know another hiatus will likely exist. And maybe that’s the secret: with any media, you need to bake in lots of present time. It’s all a balance.