Media Fast

Last weekend I decided to fast, to abstain from, media - all media - for a week.  A funny thing happened, namely, my wife an artist and teacher knows media better than I do, a media professional.

In my first day of the fast I was home all day with my son, it was too quite and I was fasting from media - which obviously means no TV.  So I turned the radio on to NPR without hesitating, not even having a tinge of guilt that I was breaking my fast.  Radio, especially the nearly commercial-free NPR, did not seem like media to me.

Neither did books (e.g. the Bible, the first form of mass media?) or facebook or tumblr or flickr or vimeo.  In fact, anything that I could control and didn’t overwhelm me with advertising fell squarely in my ‘not media’ bucket and was therefore permissible.

It didn’t take long before my media-sensitive wife (whom I would never have said of before this accidental personal ethnography experiment) called me out on everything I was doing.  She even called me out for using apps on my iPhone.  And I couldn’t turn on the Wii.  Anything that transmitted data in digital or analog form was off limits as far as my wife was concerned - all of it was media.  And she’s right, technically it is all media.

But what I found interesting was that it all didn’t feel like media.  Without knowing, I had some pretty clear subconscious assumptions of what media is and isn’t:

Media Is vs Isn’t

* Mass (Magazine) not personal (Tumblr)

* Controls me (TV) rather than controllable (iPod, streampad)

* Professionally produced or mass produced video of any kind regardless of distribution means (TV, Hulu, DVDs)

* Advertiser saturated (101.9FM) versus advertising-free (NPR)

(Side-note here is that honestly all of radio didn’t feel like media to me, for the above to be true it means I would have felt okay watching WTTW the local public broadcast station.  I didn’t because it was on TV and anything displayed on the TV is instantly “media”.)

* Impersonal (Mass) as opposed to personal/social (Facebook, Twitter)

Other Observations

* Newspaper’s truly didn’t feel like media, which is fascinating because you can’t get much more old school, mainstream media than a local daily, so they were recycled.

* Fasting from media in the information age is nearly impossible just as fasting from industrial produced goods in the industrial/post-industrial age is

* It’s an interesting excercise and had unexpected outcomes - something anybody interested in this merging of people, technology, content, brands should try for themselves and see what happens

* This idea of what feels like or doesn’t feel like media is something I had no idea existed in me (and safe to assume everybody) and is powerful in that it shapes the way I interact with the information, alters my mindset and expectations… my feelings, misguided or not, dictate the rules of engagement for me, peers, content-producers and advertisers.  And I’m sure what feels like media to me is very different to the guy down the street, my mom, my brother, a co-worker… etc.

Not just a newspaper dilemma.

Must read: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Further reading: Rosen’s Flying Seminar In The Future of News