{"id":40091,"date":"2026-07-31T01:58:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T06:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=40091"},"modified":"2026-07-31T01:58:42","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T06:58:42","slug":"our-media-consumption-devices-are-slowly-eating-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=40091","title":{"rendered":"Our media consumption devices are slowly eating the real world"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ray Bradbury wrote a short story in 1951 that has haunted me since I first read it as a teen-ager. And as I walked the streets of my neighborhood late Thursday night, I saw the perfect illustration of what Bradbury warned us about.<\/p>\n

I snapped this photo with my iPhone as I passed a house close to home. These people have a television set that\u2019s almost as big as the massive front window of their house.<\/p>\n

As I stood there in the dark street, I watched a house where the television set was larger than life. The people inside were apparently engrossed in a movie. Their cat and I were still in the real world, but their real world seemed to have been consumed by a giant television.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Pedestrian<\/a>\u201d is a simple tale about a man who walks in his own neighborhood every night. It\u2019s about a man who hasn\u2019t changed himself to become what his culture has demanded that \u201cnormal\u201d people become.<\/p>\n

Tonight, I felt like the man from the story.<\/p>\n

But the people inside this house are the normal ones who conform to what our culture offers. I\u2019m the iconoclast who sees hidden danger in what my culture offers me in a shiny package.<\/p>\n

As the man in the story walks the dark streets \u2014 alone because normal people are all inside \u2014 all of the houses seem to have the blue glow of television sets shining out of the windows. The story goes on to deal with the man\u2019s encounter with police, who are suspicious about a man who\u2019s outside walking for no reason. But the image that\u2019s always stayed with me is the bluish glow coming from the homes.<\/p>\n

Bradbury wrote this when color television wasn\u2019t a thing, when television sets were small and when many people still had better things to do with their time.<\/p>\n

But as a late-night pedestrian for many years, I\u2019ve found myself realizing over and over that Bradbury understood what our media was doing to us. He saw how much worse things could still get.<\/p>\n

He saw in 1951 the world that we\u2019ve created in 2026 \u2014 and he saw more clearly than we do what we were beginning to lose.<\/p>\n

When Bradbury wrote, television was the device he saw as consuming the world. He was right, but he never imagined that we\u2019d also carry portable devices that do the same things as our giant television screens. He never imagined that we\u2019d invent media even more dangerous than television.<\/p>\n

When I was at dinner Thursday night, a young friend came to sit down with me for a few minutes. She was ostensibly there to talk with me, but her real attention was on the portable computer that we inexplicably still call a phone.<\/p>\n

As she sat there, her attention was on the device. She tapped out messages and responses to other people. She scanned a dozen different platforms of various kinds.<\/p>\n

She had a conversation \u2014 of sorts \u2014 with me, but her real focus was on the device. Whatever existed inside that screen was more immediate to her than the flesh-and-blood human being she\u2019d come to visit for a few minutes.<\/p>\n

Nobody consciously decided to recreate our society in this way. Nobody decided that we\u2019d build our homes around television sets for decades. And nobody decided that our mobile phones would become portals into an imaginary digital space.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what happened.<\/p>\n

The flip side is the more important part, though.<\/p>\n

In accepting the tradeoff our devices have offered us, we\u2019ve slowly chosen to inhabit our media space far more than we inhabit what we used to call the real world.<\/p>\n

For most people, that digital world is exciting and real. More and more, the physical space our bodies still inhabit has become little more than the place where our bodies happen to be while our attention is somewhere else.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing inherently bad about large televisions. They\u2019re just home theaters that have become increasingly common.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing inherently wrong with the digital devices we carry in our pockets, either. They\u2019re just gateways to a world of information and resources of all kinds.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re like children who\u2019ve discovered candy for the first time. We decide that we really like candy. Then we decide that we want to eat candy pretty much all the time.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re making unwise choices about the tradeoffs we\u2019re offered \u2014 and the worst part is that we\u2019ve gone so far down that road that we no longer recognize them as tradeoffs.<\/p>\n

We no longer understand that, in accepting the bargain our culture has offered us, we\u2019re giving up something we no longer even remember. We\u2019re increasingly giving up a real connection to the real world. We\u2019re increasingly giving up a real connection to the flesh-and-blood people around us.<\/p>\n

Bradbury thought television was the danger because television was the newest technology of his time.<\/p>\n

It turns out television was only the beginning.<\/p>\n

And most people still haven\u2019t understood that we\u2019re giving up something we\u2019ll never get back \u2014 now that we\u2019ve given ourselves almost completely to the digital gods we\u2019ve made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ray Bradbury wrote a short story in 1951 that has haunted me since I first read it as a teen-ager. And as I walked the streets of my neighborhood late Thursday night, I saw the perfect illustration of what Bradbury warned us about. I snapped this photo with my iPhone as I passed a house Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-aqD","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40091"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40097,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40091\/revisions\/40097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}