Media Disease
Welcome to a crowdsourcing project to create the world’s first manual of media-based mental disorders – currently called The Media Disease Manual (MDM-1). If you’re interested in participating in this project, please read this short essay by Larry Gaudet.
Over twenty years ago I developed a list of media diseases for inclusion in my first novel, Media Therapy, for which an overly enthusiastic, possibly irresponsible book reviewer christened me “heir to McLuhan.” See my initial list of media diseases in the green box on this page.
Famously, McLuhan’s 1964 book, Understanding Media, established him as a visionary with regard to the cultural and cognitive effects of electronic communications. Stepping into his impossibly large footsteps wasn’t an explicit goal. But I thought I was on to something with media disease, which today I would broadly define as follows:
a psychological or behavioral disorder that impairs social, occupational, cognitive and moral functioning arising from exposure to or interaction with a media source, device or service.
Media Therapy was a satirical adventure that involved reworking the pseudo-scientific language from the bible of the psychiatric world, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that lists the billing codes for hundreds of mental health disorders. In my novel I set out to equate media disease with mental illness. No one anywhere was thinking much along these lines, certainly not the mainstream psychiatric or therapy world. Or the media!
My conception of media disease went beyond the obvious idea that an exponential increase in media consumption – advertising, corporate propaganda, fictionalized televisual narrative, social media – is short-circuiting our cognitive better instincts. What intrigued me was how massive daily doses of fictionalized information and mediated storytelling operated as a triggering factor in transforming people, all of us, essentially, into actors in everyday life.
Media Therapy presented a world like ours in which media therapists solved their client’s psychological problems using a process akin to rewriting a movie script. This is not so far from the truth today. Many of us may not like to hear that our modes of self-exploration – far from being prophetic quests into the mysteries of inner being – are grandiose attempts to envisage ourselves as main characters in cinematically contrived plots.
Still, my intent was less to make a contribution to clinical psychology than to attack the corporate-funded enablers of addictive media. Doing so was a means to arm another ideological bomb in my philosophical arsenal: the idea that a media-diseased population will eat away at the values and institutions that sustain a healthy democracy.
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Social or occupational impairment following any delay in access to a media product or service
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Inefficient time management resulting from the simultaneous use of multiple communications services.
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The inability to be aroused or participate in sexual relations without stimulation from a media source
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A narcissistic obsession with analyzing your life, often with the help of a paid therapist, to uncover its meanings
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Inexplicable anger accompanied by a persistent or recurrent feeling of being detached from your mental processes or estranged from your body arising from excessive computer use.
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Developing emotional resonance only on socio-political issues that attract significant media coverage.
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Referring to yourself in the third person, as if the hero in an action movie – a common disorder among celebrities.
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Conceptualizing your life as a meaningful pattern of inter-connected cinematic events, akin to a movie plot.
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The involuntary expression of opinions that directly represent the views of your corporate employer, often accompanied by the repression of more idealistic values.
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The presence of a distinct management identity or corporate personality state that forces you to behave counter to your instincts as a human being.
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Grossly distorted perceptions of reality, exaggerations of inferential thinking and hallucinations arising from exposure to malignant corporate value systems.
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A pathological desire to present a fictional situation as more valid and compelling than the world itself.
Media diseases from Media Therapy
Would you like to contribute to my list of media diseases?
If so fill out the form on this page and submit your idea. But do so on the understanding that:
You are contributing to a creative work that I alone am authoring;
You do not expect any compensation in any way for your submissions;
I am not obligated to upload your submission and can use your input in any I see fit.
Disclaimer
Over time, I will upload additional so-called media diseases that meet my criteria and likely package them as downloadable PDFs: my media disease manual.
Be advised that in compiling and sharing these so-called media diseases I am not claiming to be a therapist or medical expert. My work, should not, in any way, be interpreted, used or shared with anyone as medical or psychotherapeutic advice.
If you are struggling with what I am calling media disease, it’s solely your responsibility to contact a psychotherapist. My work in this field should be considered a contribution to artistic discussion. I’m an artist, not a clinical researcher.