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Media and The Mind

The question is; can we use image and information technologies without them infecting us and changing how we perceive, how we feel, what we think about, value and behave? The answer is no, so precede with caution. What most fail to consider is that media, symbols, words and pictures, which includes the internet – mimic the brain’s own symbolic and image making capacity. Think of media: written text, books, videos, graphic illustrations, photographs, etc., as external forms of communal or shared imagination. As we will explore below, it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to live in a mediated-reality and remain grounded in what we used to call reality. Reality used to be the resonate-representations of the external world created in the brain by our unique set of human senses. This unique set defined being human. In the not too distant past the neocortex exploded and added an inner-dimension to this sensory based reality, the imaginative world of inner-images not generated by our senses, rather by the brain itself. Imagination, by its very nature, is a subjective-virtual-reality that we very often mistake as objective. The bigger and more complex our capacity to imagine grew, the more this subjective reality …