We're 'Digitally Brainwashing' Ourselves

TOKYO: “It’s brainwashing,” says forensic psychologist Takanori Endo, speaking to Spa (Feb 24 – March 3). What nefarious manipulation is he referring to, and whom is he accusing? We the victims are guilty; if not guilty, at least willingly complicit. We’re “digitally brainwashing” ourselves – “because its not just information we get via our smartphones. We’re not aware of it but our very thought patterns are being manipulated.” Not, in his view, for the better.

Classical brainwashing has five components. Endo lists them: isolation, repetition, authority, fear, reward. Isolation?

It needn’t be solitary confinement in a prison camp for the criminally insane – which is to say, the politically suspect in regimes that call dissidence or suspected dissidence crime.

Alone at night, sleepless, smartphone at hand, social media videos flickering onscreen, seeping into the brain, the brain unresisting because exhausted, similar facts and images following one another in quick succession, which constitutes repetition, the themes fed you shaped by your viewing history and thus reinforcing, rarely challenging, your biases and inclinations, more or less locking you into a thought pattern that becomes – has already become – “reality” as far as you’re concerned, and as for authority, says Endo, this is wielded not by armed guards but by “influencers” whose approval and support give life and circulation to productions they admire or that further their agenda.

(We saw an example in last week’s Spa of an influencer, himself a former victim of school bullying, promoting to boom status a graphic exposure of bullying at a Tochigi high school; it “went viral” and succeeded in rousing indifferent authorities to action at last. It does have its good points.)

Fear, Endo says, is primarily of “bashing” – so easily done, so hard to undo. It can ruin you, shatter you. It has led to suicide. A seemingly opposite fear – opposite side of the same coin – is that of being ignored – which is worse? Best, of course – the “reward” – is praise. The more “likes” and “followers” the better, and what does it take to haul them in by the thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands? Moderate views, measured language, reasoned argument, don’t do it. To make a splash you must be loud, extreme, irrational even, the rising volume and extremism of political discourse in Japan and worldwide indicating just how pervasive this new ethic is.

And this is the nature of the contents our smartphones feed us, alone in bed sleepless at night.

Why sleepless? Well, since the world never sleeps, how can we? We might miss something. We almost certainly will miss something. Another factor, not unrelated: stress. It’s a familiar theme, inescapable; moreover says Endo, “stressed people are chronically easy to brainwash.”

The smartphone in bed at night is a key stress vent. The more stressed we are, the more feverishly to we seek release; the more feverishly, the less critically; the less critically, the more receptively, flitting from video to video, short burst to short burst, craving impact, vulnerable to it, finally “addicted” to it, says Endo. The cure: “digital detox” – “withdrawal.” It’s not easy.

Author: Michael Hoffman, Japan Today

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