The Media That Tattered Humanity into Shreds

What is the appetite of a hungry person sitting at a table with only one dish they love? Conversely, what is the appetite of that same person when standing before a buffet containing a wide variety of their favorite foods? Many of us have experienced this same situation at family and public gatherings. In the first case, focus is high on that single dish, which has no competition on the table, and the hungry person tries to enjoy it as much as possible.

As for the dishes lined up on the buffet, they dazzle the hungry eye, leaving the person unsure of what to choose. They try to taste a piece or a spoonful of each type, after being overwhelmed by the aromas of all these dishes, which confuse their best choices. Personally, I have learned to choose only one or two types among all the dishes I crave, because if I vary my choices from the buffet, I may suffer from indigestion.

Let us move from the context of a physically hungry person to that of a mentally hungry person trying to search for information among thousands of media channels. At that point, this seeker must feel lost at the media crossroads, which inevitably cause visual disturbance and auditory confusion due to the abundance of programs broadcast on media outlets and social media platforms, all targeting the human mind, which cannot comprehend such a vast amount of information simultaneously.

Hundreds of channels belonging to the three major American television networks in the United States broadcast diverse programs around the clock, and we are not even discussing the thousands of other competing television channels. Professor Wilbur Schramm, the founder of communication studies in the United States, stated that all television programs broadcast around the clock across all American TV channels are essentially bait to attract viewers to advertisements, most of which last no more than 30 seconds.

When Professor Schramm explained his theory, he knew nothing about the internet, Google, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or smartphones, which now deliver to us a tremendous variety of information that often does not interest the audience or benefit them in any way, yet they only discover its uselessness late, after being disconnected from their human world.

Mediatically, the world has gone through three stages that manipulated human thought right and left, like a tennis racket hitting a yellow ball, until we finally realized that we are mentally and psychologically exhausted, witnessing our minds scattered to pieces. In the first stage, humans lived in remote villages, unaware of events occurring in neighboring villages. In the second media stage, the world transformed into a small village due to visual media and the use of satellites, which brought the world closer together, enabling everyone to know what was happening around them, even if their villages were thousands of miles apart.

In the final and deadly media stage, humans live isolated and individually detached from their society, despite being inherently social. Each individual has created their own private world, separating them from other family members, because all the information they need reaches them while they are confined to their bedrooms. Therefore, the accurate description of our current situation is that a single family has become a cluster of adjacent villages that are mentally, intellectually, and even psychologically distant from one another. Thus, we say that while media remains an important source of education, it is also a primary cause of the fragmentation of individuals within a single family.