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Big implications of small efforts: how the instant gratification for the click changes our sensorium

By Andrey Mir on August 28, 2024 • ( 0 )

Unlike rewards in the physical world, the reward of a click is as trifling as the effort expended. The low quality incites a huge demand for quantity: sensing a hint of pleasure but never satiation, people spend more and more time online. An excerpt from the chapter “The medium is the menace” in The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.

…Billions of users become accustomed to choosing smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed gratification. In psychology, such proclivity is associated with a deficit of self-control. Coupled with constantly produced but never satiating hits of micro-pleasure, this condition leads to a growing attachment to its source – what is more commonly known as digital addiction.

Those managing to avoid the risk of addiction do not escape the larger risk of critical detachment from physical reality. Adapting to the digital world alters the sensorium, diminishing the endurance, diligence, and resilience required to succeed in the physical world.

Technological development – from the use of fire to the invention of the hammer, the wheel, and the remote control (which was, for the sensorium, the prototype of a click) – has always sought to reduce the effort needed to receive rewards. The difference today is that the transition from the physical world to the digital world is happening with astonishing rapidity. The shift from nomadic to sedentary culture took millennia; the migration from villages to cities took centuries; the resettling of humankind onto the Internet will take about 70 years, starting in the 1980s with the introduction of the web.

In this period, humans will have to live in both physical and digital worlds. The older generations – digital immigrants – developed their basic physical skills before the Internet. Millennials, on the other hand, became the first digital natives. Starting with them, the physical, intellectual, and social development of individuals has been subjected to the pressure of the click’s instant reward. Digital natives have grown up in an environment where rewards are not linked to significant effort but rather incentivize mere self-identification.

Interestingly, instead of the dichotomy of “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants,”[i] there was a suggestion to use the terms “visitors” and “residents” as better descriptors of online engagement.[ii] Indeed, younger generations reside in the digital world, while older generations merely visit it. However, the reverse is also true: digital residents only visit the physical world for some residual physical needs. And they always hurry to return to the digital environment, which is more comfortable for them due to its reward system. For them, digital residents, the slow and harsh physical reality requires too much effort. As more activities migrate online, digital natives increasingly withdraw from the physical world – the more disturbing part of their hybrid reality. The offline hesitancy of digital natives contributes to what is known as delayed adulthood: Millennials and the next generations have less or later sex, start fewer families, drive fewer cars, leave their parents’ homes later (if at all), and so on.

Digital natives are becoming more physically and psychologically adapted to their new environment, but not to the old one. Coaches complain that kids are unable to firmly hold a hockey stick or do pull-ups. Their arms have been repurposed for manipulating digital devices, with the thumbs becoming operational fingers while losing their grip strength. Screens enhance tunnel vision – a digital native can see on-screen details that a digital immigrant cannot. As an “amputation” response (McLuhan), the peripheral vision of digital natives is deteriorating. Indeed, peripheral vision is redundant for screen use. But it is still required for safety in physical space.

When playing video games, digital immigrants instinctively dodge bullets or blows, but digital natives do not. Their bodies don’t perceive an imaginary digital threat as a real one. Their sensorium has readjusted their bodies to ignore fake digital threats. There is no instinctive fear of heights or trauma in the digital world. Similarly, the fear of collision is cultivated by sports and physical activities, not by video games. In the digital world, even death can be overcome through re-spawning. What will happen when millions of young people with weakened grip strength, peripheral blindness, and no instinctive fear of collision start driving cars? Will media evolution be ready in time with its self-driving cars and self-driving everything?

Cultural settings are changing as well. Since clicks are so easy to perform, the exposure of people’s presence to one another becomes enormous. The reward of recognition, promised by a click, gets lost in the incredible noise of all users’ requests for affirmation. In the old physical world, people competed through the intensity of effort; in the new digital world, they compete through the intensity of their identity signals. Hence, the drift towards extreme opinions, outrage on social media, and political polarization is only natural in a society that rewards the intensity of self-identification more readily than it rewards efforts.

The click’s instant reward renders any lasting effort, including long reading and even watching a long feature film, redundant and undesirable. The click’s instant reward reshapes the structure of content packaging. The classic packaging of any content into the template of “exposition – climax – resolution,” which used to be the structure of the completed narrative and hence of many organized activities, is becoming too time-consuming and bulky. In the past, linear reading of large, complete chunks of information might have required time and effort but helped develop rational, abstract, and deliberate thinking. This is being replaced with the flow of identity-signaling on Twitter and TikTok. Content used to be packed in complete parcels, such as books or stories; now it is packed into a flow – the news feed requiring endless scrolling.

The mainstream media hurry to warn that democracy is in danger, but these are the old democratic institutions and elites they worry about. In fact, never before has humankind had such an amount of democracy as now. It’s not the lack of democracy but, quite the opposite, the oversupply of direct democracy that poses the real threat to the old democratic establishment. A child of the printing press, representative democracy, which was based on rational deliberation and institutions, collapses under the pressure of direct democracy based on digital torrents of instant identity signaling. The only survival strategy for the old establishment is to seize control of the latest form of social institutionalization – the digital platforms.

Recent social and political upheavals reflect this conflict between two subspecies of people whose sensorium, moral principles, and culture are based on either the delayed rewards offered by old media or instant rewards offered by new media. People familiar with the reward systems of both the physical world and digital reality can still differentiate between them, even when seduced into digital consumption. People who have experienced only digital rewards cannot. They tend to extend their digital reward expectations onto physical reality, demanding rewards for their mere existence/identity. Society is globally shifting from rewards for efforts to rewards for identity.

An excerpt from the chapter “The Medium is the Menace” in The Viral Inquisitor and Other Essays on Postjournalism and Media Ecology.
(The essay “The Medium is the Menace” was first published in City Journal.)

Andrey Mir

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