Nothing New Under the Sun
In a world where there was no internet, no cell phones, no invasive, distracting, time-consuming digital media, free streaming, and available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week...we had the first Ghostbusters movie.
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Birthed from the brain of Dan Ackroyd and release in 1984, Ghostbusters was something the world had never seen before. You had comedy, suspense, visual effects, a damsel in not so much distress as demonic possession, and a happy ending. Oh, and a terrific theme song (that may or may not have been plagiarized so it may not be relevant to the point I am about to make…)
Today, in a world where we have instant, never-ending access to the internet in the palms of our hands, our cars can almost (ALMOST) drive themselves, computers that CAN “think” for themselves…
…we have two more Ghostbusters movies that came out within five years of each other.
Many of the movies and television shows we see today are remakes of something we’ve seen before. Bel Air is a new take on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Death on the Nile has been made several times before. Disney remade several of its animated features into live-action or digital versions. Even the incredibly successful Spider-Man: No Way Home is not only a remake, it is a remake of a remake. We are on our third Spider-Man in the last twenty years (Emde, 2021).
As Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, nothing is new under the sun.
There’s nothing wrong with Hollywood remakes, it just seems like lately there have been a lot of them. One reason is that they are incredibly profitable, and Hollywood is a business (Emde, 2021). But is it more than money? Are we losing our creativity? Where are all the new ideas? Why are there so many Spider-Men?
Our readings this week deal with how children have been impacted by technology. One of the issues raised is how the prevalence of technology, particularly for entertainment purposes, affects their imaginations. The future of our creative world is spending more and more time online and on some form of screen. Eventually, everything they do could be done on a computer screen, on the internet. They will use screen technology for the rest of their lives, and in more ways than we ever have or could imagine.
So future generations will not be able to escape the screen. But using your imagination, learning how to use your own thoughts and ideas to amuse yourself and create new things is important. I don’t know what a generation who does not do that more regularly will look like. Will we have less art? Less literature or drama? Will be less creative as a society? Are we already experiencing that?
Look at the creativity and attention involved in creating amazing art like The Veiled Virgin, a 19th-century work by Italian sculptor Giovanni Strazza. Sculptors were able to visualize the effect of sheer, gossamer fabric and then coax that out of cold, hard marble using hand-held tools. There are levels of creativity involved in a sculpture like that that I cannot even fathom. Seeing it in your mind’s eye, meticulously planning its execution, the time-consuming attention to detail…
You can 3-D print that now. And sure, that requires some skill and time, but once we design the computer program that can complete the task, all we have to do is sit back and push a button—and once we push it, we would like for it to happen quickly, please.
One impatient chisel and the marble veil is ruined.
Attention is one of the main things that psychologists are concerned about in children with the prevalence of technology. Dr. Jim Taylor for Psychology Today acknowledges that new technologies are shaping the way that we think in both obvious and subtle, deliberate and unintentional, and advantageous and detrimental ways and that they are emerging so fast that we will not have the ability to use historical hindsight or the time needed to study how these advances are changing the way children think before it is too late, and the effects are already permanent (Taylor, 2012).
The effects are not all bad. Yes, the use of technology is changing how our brains are wiring, but that happened when humans learned to read. Now because of the internet, younger generations are evolving and learning how to scan information more efficiently and effectively.
But Dr. Taylor still warns about how it is affecting children’s attention spans. He describes attention as “the gateway to thinking” (Taylor, 2021). Without it, he says, perception, memory, language, learning, creativity, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision making are all affected. “The ability of your children to learn to focus effectively and consistently lays the foundation for almost all aspects of their growth and is fundamental to their development into successful and happy people,” he says (Taylor, 2012).
Just like in the animal kingdom, the environment children grow up in influences their attention spans. Dr. Taylor describes the evolution of the media used to entertain children. Reading books required sustained attention, as well as imagination and memory. Then came television, which gave children visuals already formed—they did not need to use their imagination, and their attention only needed to last until the end of the program (or until the commercial break).
And then came the internet.
Dr. Taylor described a metaphor comparing reading to the internet and illustrates how technology has changed the way we absorb information. He said that book reading was like scuba diving: the reader becomes submerged in a “quiet, visually restricted, slow-paced setting with few distractions and, as a result, is required to focus narrowly and think deeply on the limited information that is available to them” (Taylor, 2012). The internet was like riding a jet ski: “skimming along the surface of the water at high speed, exposed to a broad vista, surrounded by many distractions, and only able to focus fleetingly on any one thing” (Taylor, 2012).
So will technology change our children’s brains so that they will be less likely to produce new, exciting forms of creativity? Or is the creative spark in human beings too powerful for an iPhone to take away? Will we see creativity expressed in diverse ways, through a lens of technology? Will the next Mona Lisa be drawn on the iPad? Or the newest modern marvel of architecture be designed first in Minecraft?
Will I have to see Spider-Man number seventeen before I die?
References:
Emde, L. (2021, December 31). Hollywood continues its reign of remakes. The Huntington News. https://huntnewsnu.com/67430/lifestyle/hollywood-continues-its-reign-of-remakes/
Taylor, J. (2012, December 4). How Technology Is Changing the Way Children Think and Focus. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201212/how-technology-is-changing-the-way-children-think-and-focus
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