Media Rehab
Time to recover your mind?
Image Credit: Created with, and licensed from, Exactly.AI (Model owner: Zu Pink)While researching and writing the Sustainable Synthetics & Inoculated Minds series, one thing became profoundly clear over and over again: when we consider the emerging impacts of a generative AI-enabled media cycle, our current media diets are really not fit for purpose.
This is hardly a surprise when we consider the foundations propping up today’s media ecosystem: broken business models, misaligned incentives, and predatory delivery systems that exhaust rather than enrich our minds. For when media is engineered for maximum hold, shares, and ripples, what surfaces isn’t what serves us.
Pair that with its abundance, irresistibility, and ease of access and there's no reason to build hunger for anything specific. Instead, perpetual satiety frequently overrides our ability to regulate our intake.
Before a new, synthetically-laden media cycle fully manifests we find ourselves in a liminal moment, giving us a chance to reset and rebuild our relationship with the media we consume. To help us navigate the in-between and prepare for the new, I've created Media Rehab.
Media Rehab is a 21-day experiment based on a three-part method, where your mind is your lab and the ingredients of your daily media soup are your material. It is made up of three protocols:
FEELINGS | Learn to tune into how different types of media affect your emotional states
SOUPS | Reassess the ingredients of your daily media soup
RHYTHMS | Adjust your consumption to work with, not against, your daily cycles
You’ll be supported by fellow participants in a communal space and have access to weekly drop-in Zoom sessions throughout the experiment.
If this resonates with you, I’d love for you to register your interest at the site below. While we're starting small with a pilot cohort this Spring, we plan to expand access over time. And please share it with any friends and loved ones who might benefit from it.
→→→ mediarehab.xyz ←←←
How Media Rehab Came To Be
While the seeds for Media Rehab emerged from the aforementioned essay series, it has, in fact been ten years in the making.
A core aspect of my work to date has entailed researching how technologies shape people, cultures, and societies (and vice versa), all over the world. This has frequently involved running experiments with people designed to surface their deeper needs – such as Internet deprivation, smartphone detoxes, and trialing various types of content diets.
I distinctly remember a participant in Peru, who, after his week-long content diet, told me: "When I first started your experiment, it felt like you thought I had a problem - but I was like 'Problem? What problem?! I don't have a problem!!' Then, a few days into the week, I realised, ok, maybe I do have a problem. And then I was happy I got to do this."
In hindsight, this reveals how building awareness of the nature of consumption was a potent first step towards change. And when it is supported by tools that encourage it (delightful rather than punitive), practices that sustain it (practical enough to become habits), and a community that supports it (accountability through connection), this step can lead to notable shifts in how we choose and engage with our media.
These last ten years also saw me indulge my curiosity in the workings of the mind. Since 2015, I have been learning about cognitive psychology and neuroscience, including through the lenses of Eastern contemplative traditions. Accrued insights not only helped me - a life-long media junkie since I first heard the 6am siren call of Hanna-Barbera on a Saturday morning - identify which media experiences serve my own mind and which ones don’t: they encouraged this offering and provided the rigour that underpins it.
Complementing all this was a more recent immersion in media ecology - particularly in the work of Neil Postman, who posited the evocative concept of ‘media consciousness’ in his text Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985). Admittedly, while we’re aligned on the merits of the “demystification of media” (particularly the development of “deep and unfailing awareness of [its] structure and effects”), he may consider my follow-through somewhat unorthodox. Equally, Marshall McLuhan would probably have baulked at Media Rehab’s focus on the actual content and its impacts on our senses and minds.
Media Rehab represents the convergence of all these insights gained and lessons learned. But I will, no doubt, learn the most from you, should you care to implement the method. In turn, you will make it better for everyone in the future.
- Lucia