In his video essay Why The Movies Will Never Feel the Same Again, Thomas Flight shared an idea that should’ve occurred to me already. The idea of Media Ecology, which looks at the physical, cultural, and psychological environments wherein we consume media. Already for the better part of a year I have been thinking about Attention Ecology, an idea I found ingenious for taking Ecology out of its native context and applying it to the psychological phenomenon of Attention, and yet it had not ccurred to me to reproduce that same trick with something else.

Through the lens of Media Ecology, Thomas Flight analyzes how the circumstances of moviewatching dictate what it means to watch a movie. Once, watching a movie meant commuting to a certain place at a specific time to see something that you were likely never to see again. It was an occasion and often a communal experience among friends, loved ones, neighbors, and other locals. Today, a movie can be something insignificant and something entirely private. It can be nothing more than a stimulus for alleviating restlessness as one does house chores or waits for sleep to come. A movie is no longer just a public event. It can be like a flavor of digital chewing gum, a substance waiting in our pocket for a moment of boredom. The default mode of watching movies has changed and going to the cinema is now an unusual one. Consequently, movies today play a different role in our lives.

This is true of music as well. In the past, it may have seemed inconceivable to divorce music from its social aspect, but now the primary way to consume it – at least in my “Western” reality – is in personal privacy. We put devices in our ears that acoustically shut out the world beyond our heads and pipe into our consciousness a private sountrack. Books function in a similar way. They are technologies that encode into symbols for the solitary consumption of readers ideas, stories, and facts that might be otherwise shared in social spaces through means like conversation and lecture. These mediums are layers of communication that open a gulf between people and fill it with alternative, virtual experiences. With one hand media brings us together and with the other it sets us apart. As a supplement, media is a tremendously enriching substance, but problems arise when it becomes our primary means for connecting to the world.

Technology is not evil. But it gives us power, and power corrupts. Who can blame a human that, when anxious feelings spring as they do so readily in the kind of lives we live, reaches for the anesthetic device always at their disposal? We need barely lift a finger and our mind is cast out beyond the preoccupations in our head and into a virtual source of stimulation tailored to our taste. Mindless escape is a bad habit and it is a common one because technology gives us the power to indulge it so easily.

Chastening and berating ourselves to resist stimulation that is so easily accessible is a poor strategy for countering the negative effects of digital technology. A much more efficient and productive one is ecological, one that looks to the nature of the organisms and to the nature of their environment. What we need to preserve the magic of moviewatching and more generally to neutralize the ills of unadulterated access to infinite digital streams is to reintroduce limits that were removed not for our benefit but in service of the profit motive. We must contrive restraints to create new default behaviors. Put simply, we can change our behavior by changing what we interact with.

The possible tactics are many. Leave your phone in a different room, somewhere out of sight and reach. Use a purpose-built alarm clock instead of the equivalent feature your phone offers. Delete problematic apps from your phone. Configure it to render in black and white. Exchange it for a flip phone or for a “dumb phone.” The methods I find the most satisfying are cheap and simple. Market solutions for problems created by the market feel the worst. And they’re unnecessary, anyway. The most relevant technology for shaping our reality is the one in our head. Sometimes, changing our environment and therefore our behavior is as simple as introducing a paperthin layer of mediation between ourselves and the technology we use.

Many times I’ve sat down to watch a movie with friends and we found ourselves browsing torpidly through a streaming library so vast that no single movie seemed to have much luster. To neutralize this unpleasant effect, I might employ a tactic I’ve used successfully this year for books. I prepared a short list of books to read throughout the year. Each time I finished one I checked it off my list and each time I wanted to begin a new one I perused the remaining options. With satisfaction I watched the checkmarks accumulate one by one and each time felt rekindled my motivation to continue progressing. I felt the value of each book on the list because it was one of a handful and I spent very little time feeling like I was missing out because I had mentally eliminated an endless library of options. If I was reading one book, I was only ignoring a few others and I would get to those soon enough anyhow.

It’s startling how powerful a contrived rule can be. It seems silly that the human mind could be duped so easily, but then again it is a testament to its power that it can take an idea and construct from it a reality. I suppose it is precisely our adaptibility to virtual domains that gets us into trouble in the first place.