Visual media rules! The lost war against forgetting

In an Introduction to Poetry class at RMIT some years ago I asked the students to memorise 20 lines of verse and recite them at the next seminar. A voice blurted out “Why?” She didn’t see any value in the exercise. If you can “Google” the verse anytime, why remember it?

Oxford University’s Professor Susan Greenfield has done considerable work on the rise of image technology and its neurological effects on thought processing and behaviour.

She was in Australia recently to deliver the annual Florey lecture at the University of Adelaide. Professor Greenfield argues the “yuck and wow” scenario of the Internet - “where you live in the short-term world where you have immediate reactions to things that flash up in your face and bombard your ears” - might drive brain connections and brain cell circuitry in a way that shortens the attention span.

"But for everything you win (with electronic games) you always lose something … Just because you can process information fast, that's very different to knowledge.

"For knowledge you really need to be able to reflect on something that's coming in - you have to slow your brain down. That's what reading does," Professor Greenfield said.

The images from TV-net float like motes in our mind and then settle outside conscious recall because electronic images have no sense of place. They are not symbols, they are not metaphors, they are images, the blind giants of the media world.

Yet this is not to damn all online communication. I regularly get news updates online from a range of sources. I certainly don’t criticise blogs or any of the other forms where people reach out from their computers with a point of view. I’m mindful that I’m writing in a digital medium now. I’m writing on a computer.

But understand this, TV-net is the command centre of the new epistemology. We have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they, and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

It is not merely that TV-net is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off screen the same metaphor prevails. Is it any wonder people feel confused?