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 a stimulating source that lulls someone into sleep or that distracts a tired homemaker while they fold laundry. The default mode of watching movies has changed and going to the cinema is now an unusual one. Today, movies 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 the social acts of storytelling and conversation. These mediums are layers of communication that open a gulf between people and fill it with virtual experiences of each other. With one hand media brings us together and with the other it sets us apart. It is the dose that makes the poison. 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 so easily indulge it.

Chastening and berating ourselves to resist stimulation that is so easily accessible is a poor strategy. 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 the limits technology has dutifully removed for our convenience and to reduce the options it has generously accumulated for our benefit. We must contrive restraints to create new default behaviors.

There are so many possible tactics. Put the phone on the other side of the room. Leave it in the car. At night time, replace it with a purpose-built alarm clock. 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.”

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 finish one I check it off my list and each time I want to begin a new one I peruse the remaining options. With satisfaction I’ve watched the checkmarks accumulate gradually and felt each time a jolt of enthusiastic motivation to pick up the next book. I feel the value of each book on the list because its membership comes at the cost of excluding other millions and I spend very little time feeling like I’m missing out because I have mentally eliminated an endless library of options. If I’m reading this book, I’m only ignoring a few others and I will 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 this affinity and ease with virtual domains that gets us into trouble in the first place.