The Power of Entertainment's "Confusion"

“Oh My people! Those who guide you lead you astray, and confuse the direction of your paths.” Isaiah 3:12

For this article, I would like to start by declaring that Entertainment, especially television, is crafted through confusion. It is not necessarily always direct and overt, but a more clandestine form of confusion – one generated through imagery. Keep in mind, images themselves are not necessarily confusing or detrimental. Imagery has the power to increase brain capacity. Confusion comes through their presentation. The average length of time an image is on screen (based on current television programs and movies) is around 2.25 seconds. In music videos that number can move into the tenths of seconds, as images race past our brains at lightning speeds. Although the brain has the ability to comprehend these images, it does not have the time to fully process them. But they have affected the psyche nonetheless. Consider the following quote from educator Joseph Chilton Pearce in a 1999 Public Radio Broadcast:

“You find that in television, in order to keep the brain awake, you have to have these violent shifts in imagery very quickly or the brain, literally in its habituation factor, (which is an ancient mammalian part of the brain that takes over – saying in effect, “this information has nothing do with us, there is no real meaning to what is coming into the sensory system), so the brain habituates to it. And the higher cortical structures actually go to sleep, literally.” (1)

It is quite different from reading a book. When you read, your brain has the ability re-associate itself with a difficult passage, reworking it mentally until the mind fully comprehends the written passage. Consider the multitude of times you have “re-read” passages in newspapers, books, magazines or journals in order to greater understand the author’s meaning or to glean more from the text. But through the media forms of Entertainment, images sweep across the mind and then quickly disappear, replaced by a new set of pictures, and so on and so forth.

To better illustrate this principle, let’s perform a little test. I’d like you to make a mental picture of each of items in the paragraph below, one immediately after the other. Then, after the final item, quickly cover the list. Try to picture each word in less than half a second, then jump to the next word. Ready, here we go:

Think of a box, a shoe, a shell, a horse, a lemon, a tree, a balloon, glass, flower, bird, apple, house – now cover the list.

Now that you’ve made mental pictures of each of these items, what was the fourth item on the list? The ninth item? How about the first? What about the last? The reason you aren’t able to better recollect these images – you pictured just seconds ago – was that each visual representation was immediately replaced by another image. Your mind didn’t have time to process the items, because it was too busy grappling with processing the succeeding one. If this can happen in a moment your brain is somewhat engaged, how much worse during the neural passivity of watching television?

This lightning fast “view and replace” method of television and movie projection leaves indelible marks on the brain, but mostly as trivia, images with which to draw from, but with no general understanding of their reason or purpose, as Pearce stated above. It is similar to the drastic difference of a person spending a day walking around an art museum, and another individual cycling through the same paintings via a projector with each painting visible for no more than 2.25 seconds. Both persons have the ability to draw from the imagery they have viewed, but one has a much deeper understanding and application of the paintings his brain spent the day slowly processing.

This lack of application gives the viewer little to cognitively do with the recently viewed imagery. Instead of increased mental capacity, the viewer is simply left with a series of random images, and finds minutes, even hours, wasted. Yet these unprocessed, random images can then manifest in random order and for no apparent reason. Think about this in your own life. Have you had times where an image with absolutely no contextual significance will just pop up in your mind? People with ADD suffer from a debilitating barrage of these types of images. The more imagery to recollect the more fuel for the disease. This would help explain why, in the age of entertainment, there are so many sufferers of psychological disorders such as this one, and why the problem is growing so epidemic.

JUST FOLLOWING THE RULES

It is not necessarily the fault of the director, videographer, or script writer. It is how the media has been told to operate. One of the biggest commandments in Hollywood is “Thou shalt not have talking heads.” A “talking head” refers to any scene in a movie or television program where a person simply speaks for long periods of time; where a camera stays fixed in a single position without giving the viewer any other visual interest. But the enemy of mankind, through Entertainment, has used this rule and warped its extreme. And at its most extreme, it becomes a valuable weapon against the amazing destiny that should mark your life.

Allow me to explain. One of the synonyms to the word confusion is “distraction.” It is through this understanding that the goal of the devil becomes crystalline in its clarity. Referencing the passage in Isaiah 3:12 again, the let’s substitute the word “confuse” for “distract”, and if you’ll allow me a bit more leeway, the word “paths” for the word “destiny.” Let’s read the passage again with those new synonyms added:

“Those who guide you… distract the direction of your destiny”

Does that shine a greater light on what is happening to you? You are distracted from the very world-altering plans God has specifically designed for you to accomplish. Strategically, the devil’s method is a one-two punch.

First, distraction: The amount of time you spend engaged in Entertainment, not only takes you away from accomplishing your destiny, but even thinking about it. All of that time is wasted (apart from simply being entertained), stripping time away from the natural accomplishments and destiny-based plans God has for you.

And second, confusion: Since your brain can’t fully process what you view, time has not only been lost, but you have taken a “step back” mentally. In addition to the step back, your brain now has a massive amount of imagery in which no file folders have been labeled to hold the images, figuratively speaking. This leads to random imagery showing up at inopportune times of strong progress. For example, how many times have you been highly engrossed in an event or accomplishment, only to be pulled from the moment by a random image or thought that you had viewed on television? Harmless distracting imagery like the energizer bunny, Kramer from Seinfeld, or the MTV logo? Or worse, damaging and disturbing imagery, like a Freddy Krugger bludgeoning a helpless co-ed, a rape scene from an “art film”, or a distorted face screaming at you from a music video?

Each time one of these images comes back up, you brain forces them to be reevaluated, and in certain cases re-classed back into your mind. The more imagery, the more time the reevaluation and reclassification process takes away from your natural time, or the more “you are distracted from your destiny.” There is nothing wrong with watching television or films, it simply becomes an issue of priority. Of understanding what is happening to you to deliberately thwart your success and forward progress.

THE DEADLY ADDITION OF PORNOGRAPHY’S “CONFUSION”

Pornography, however, takes this concept to the extreme, for the goal of pornography is visual sensory overload. Since pornography is predominantly about image and not about content, imagery is its main mechanism and ubiquitous images its method of keeping the visitor engaged. In the past, the number of viewable pornographic images any one person could see at any given time was limited to the number of publications one had purchased, and in the immediate physical vicinity of the viewer to a location that provided such publications. Now the number of viewable images is infinite, one need no longer have the publications or videos in hand. Man can now surf through a ubiquitous number of sites with a mere few clicks on the mouse. As the physical stimulus to the visual imagery begins to wane with time, more imagery must be presented to continue engaging physically, not just visually. What in the past was a catalog of images ranging in the double digits, can now reach 4 and five digits in a mere few hour viewing session.

Now imagine these images coming back up in the mind of the junior high school teacher as he is leaned over your daughter answering a study question in class. Or in the mind of the forty-five year old man at the mall, as he walks around amidst underage girls in tankinis and large Abercrombe and Fitch posters. Or perhaps these images popping up at the exact moment daddy is kissing his little girl goodnight. How about these images coming into the mind of a preacher as he is instructing us from the pulpit, or in the mind of a mother as she is getting her teenage daughter dressed for school? As tragic as these scenarios are, they are not mere conjecture. Though we control the initial mode of delivery and amount of pornographic content, we have no say so in when these images will reappear in our minds. Could it be that the rise in sexual assaults and child-kidnappings have occurred because these type of unprocessed images have plagued the minds of these perpetrators at inopportune times due to the ubiquitous amount of content inputted into the psyche?

Proverbs states that a “wise man gives thought to his actions.” The wise man does not merely analyze action, but the consequence of action. It is through the consequential lens that he then reassesses the original action. Based on the consequences, is that action necessary or detrimental to life, vision and future? Modern day marketing has meant to shatter this discipline, but the objective outcome of our lack of consideration of actions has become so glaring we must take notice.

But it starts with us, as Christ Followers, first. We must give thought to our own actions. Doing so will reveal far greater strategies than you may have ever considered possible. It is certainly designed to be that way, for your life’s potential is far greater than you can imagine. The strategies against you, and the rest of humanity, prove it so. Remove the strategies, and you remove their impact – and you, as its first ambassadors, can reveal a world without confusion, without distraction – and begin to shine the light on a true world with a real and powerful destiny.

(1) KCBX Public Radio, April 12, 1999 [Original Broadcast] – http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/The%20Case%20Against%20Television.htm