"More Better Faster!": How Our Spastic Digital Culture Scrambles Our Brains

By David Bollier, On the Commons. Posted June 30, 2009.

By coincidence, this week's issue of The New Yorker has a major article by Margaret Talbot on the use of "neuro-enhancing drugs" that are increasingly being taken to boost one's cognitive performance. There is apparently a large underground culture of people – students, business executives, poker players and others seeking a competitive mental edge – who take drugs like Adderall and modafinil to stay awake, alert and mentally engaged, especially for tasks that require sustained attention. The whole idea is to prolong one's productivity and efficiency.

Taking drugs to prolong one's productive engagement becomes a new way adapt one's very body and mind to modern demands for "efficiency." Why remain a normal human being when one can use chemicals to super-charge one's metabolism in order to meet the harsh imperatives of a college education, business negotiations, international travel and general multitasking? Defenders liken the neuro-enhancing drugs to drinking coffee. But that's a rationalization; no one really knows how safe these productivity boosters are over the long term.

The scary things is that we are slowly "papering over" the forms of human consciousness that we regard as gratuitous….yet which history has shown are essential to a meaningful life. We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves.

Yet this is no Brave New World imposed by a totalitarian state; we are "voluntarily" doing it to ourselves. While there is certainly a voluntary aspect to using neuro-enhancing drugs, in other respects our cultural norms of efficiency and busyness are encouraging this abuse. When your everyday life is saturated by email, cell phones, voicemail and texting, it's not a big leap to take a drug that will help you survive the "fast-time" norms of modern life.

In his lecture, David Levy called for an "information environmentalism" to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives: advertising, telemarketing, junk mail, radio and TV, and various digital media. Perhaps we can begin to push back on the cognitive overload, he suggested, and recover some modicum of silence. That's the purpose of the "Do Not Call" list to prevent unsolicited telemarketing calls, for example.

We might also begin to design physical spaces with contemplative needs in mind (think of the Library of Congress' reading room, for example). Many businesses have discovered that they can make money by offering consumers the opportunity to "buy back" the quiet that has been taken from us. The Bose noise-canceling headphones are marketed in this fashion.

I liked how Levy put it: "We need the equivalent of old-growth forests and marshlands in our mental lives."

For more about David Levy's work on the topic of information overload and the need to recover contemplative mind, it's worth chasing down a special issue of the journal Ethics and Information Technology that Levy guest-edited in December 2007 (vol. 9, no. 4). Entitled "Information, Silence and Sanctuary," the issue contains six thoughtful essays on a topic that deserves far more awareness. Unfortunately, the journal is locked behind a paywall, so you may be university access to read it. Another person worth consulting is Ivan Illich, who wrote about silence as a commons.

Given the powerful economic forces that have a self-interest in colonizing our consciousness (marketers routinely talk about seizing "mindshare"), devising effective ways to protect our contemplative consciousness is going to be a formidable challenge indeed. But on the other hand, this is not a struggle we can avoid. The alternative is a jittery, jagged postmodern insanity.

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