Neil Postman, prophetic media critic of the age of television that gave rise to our social media-infused day, saw a trivial, distracted, and self-centered culture emerge because of technologies deeply integrated into public life. He understood that novel technology is not simply additive nor subtractive, but ecological in nature. It changes everything. It effects every part of a society from top to bottom. In his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he diagnosed:
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
The designs inherent in the television as a “performer” reshaped society as an “audience.” This was a massive shift to say the least. The dream of liberal democracy is radical participation through action, not the jeers, boos, resounding laughter, and homogeneous concordance of televised democracy. Don’t like what you see, change the channel. Watching a presidential debate with company, turn the volume down so your voice rings louder than your technicolor opponents. Audiences hold all the power in this kind of asynchronous, parasocial relationship. This new character of social life in the West paved the way for the technology we are all the product of today. The smartphone.
Fifteen years after its release, we have seen a new design cement into place an old way of seeing ourselves. From the first version of the iPhone to the original launch of Facebook, the user has been the center of attention. Engineers ask, How can we create a user experience that is personal, user-friendly, accessible? Some of these questions provoke thoughtful, flourishing answers. They also have the power to make a user believe, subtly and over prolonged exposure to interfaces, that they are the center of the universe. As theologian Samuel D James put it, “the center of gravity in the online world is your profile, in which you are granted a near-godlike ability to craft an identity.” This kind of navel-gazing is prone to create a culture that does not look up to see community, details, and differences.
Similarly, digital technology is not typically a friend to nuance and complexity. Again from James, “our online conversations seem to drive us deeper into our pre-dug intellectual foxholes.” We see this all the time in toxic Twitter (X) battlefields and public forums that silo off attacker from the scapegoat they are burning. What we often fail to notice is what the obliteration of friction does to complicated, deep understanding.
We have been trained by our devices to look away from otherness and complexity, and we have lost so much. I return now to trees “as one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting visual metaphors.” Manuel Lima, the cartographer of the artistic and practical journey tree images have been on, says “the tree is an extraordinary prism through which we can observe the evolution of human consciousness, ideology, culture, and society.” These ancient sages of our forests have been abused and forgotten by our western character of hurry and individualism.
You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above. That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen.
This “root problem” The Overstory sets out to explore has a cause. Our smartphones instruct us to not stop and to not care. We digest this message directly from the devices we touch more than any family member or friend. The moment we are confronted with a choice to lean into complexity and otherness, our efficiently trained character reinforces our proclivity for avoidance. Understanding another the plight of the poor is hard. Loving those who have hurt us is hard. Diving into relationship with people who don’t look like we do is hard. And hard things are not on our agenda.
We need counter-formative practices to recreate an inherent desire and ability to do hard things like these.
We need to “notice more fractals.”
