I ATE TOO MUCH: ON DIGITAL CONSUMPTION
6 HOURS AND 10 MINUTES
Was my screen time on my phone during a day in October in 2020. My phone screen is 5 1/2 inches tall by 2 1/2 inches wide, or an area of 13.75 square inches.
A study found that the average digital/social media user spent ~10 seconds looking at each novel image. Even if that’s wrong, I would assume it’s an overestimate
6 hrs and 10 min = 370 minutes, or 22,220 seconds.
22,220 seconds / 10 seconds per image is 2,220 novel images.
2,220 images x 13.75 square inches = a digital consumption area of 2,543.75 square feet. All that area densely packed and stored in some unfortunate part of my brain.
If my one day of screen time were to be visualized as a painting, it would be on a canvas that’s 10 feet tall by 254 feet wide. Almost as along as a football field.
This totality of daily consumption brings two paradoxical anxieties to my mind.
The abundance of information renders information useless
“Information is thought to create communication . . . Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication.
A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience.”
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
Each grain of media in this abundance affects me completely
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message.”
-Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967
I have been consuming everything of which I can make sense of nothing, and this great pollution of nothingness will inevitably change all of me.
I ATE WAY TOO MUCH.
