Walking, sitting at a bus stop, in a cafe or waiting room, lining up in a shop, walking the dog, visiting a playground with the kids -- whatever else they're doing, everyone seems to be scrolling through a smartphone at the same time. When do you ever see anyone reading a book, watching a sunset, or just sitting? Just thinking? Thoughts are buried under the spillage which content-providers lay out online. Advertisers and meme-merchants are on a roll.
The device-addicted are like pollinators primed by evolution to flit from bloom to bloom until they die. No thought is required because their brains are pre-wired.
Once they learned that people's brains were pre-wired to crave gratification, and once digital innovation provided the perfect tool for harnessing cravings, advertisers and influencers found it easy to herd us.
We are told the Internet offers free choice, but the algorithmic influencers and persuaders have pre-arranged the choices ("-range" coming from the French "ranger", to rank). This parody of freedom reminds us of Marx's theory that the State would wither away once the working class awoke. Instead, a pan-national state has come into being with an iron grip on our brains: the Cyber-state (and the world's workers never awoke, they just got "woke".)
Can we break out of cyber-bondage? Re-discover scattered bits of personal thought "recollected in tranquillity", phone turned off? We could replace social media with private media by turning our gaze to the physical world, to weather, birds, nature, passers-by, and our own ideas. Non-democratic governments now outnumber democratic ones on the obsessively phone-checking world stage; maybe because democracy depends on free-thinking citizens?
As we re-claim individual thought our addicted fingers might itch to start pecking again. We'll have to sit on our hands and free up our eyes. Yours might be rolling at this suggestion, but then again they might enjoy time off the scroll. They might even read a book in print. It's interesting how before the advent of the printed (or handwritten) book there was the ancient scroll -- of papyrus, say -- and after the printed book there was the online scroll. In between, we lived in a special literary moment.
Now, as in some of those earlier times, we live in a period of ideological thought control. Call something "hate" and it's banned. In former times people scratched messages in crypts, or like spies wrote coded secrets on scrolls slipped into holes in a rock wall: the romance of censor-dodging. Today, it's almost more fun to write for a world that tries to stop you than for one that scans-and-forgets you, un-noticing.
What's ahead? More constriction, thought police and censorship as far as we can tell. So, more scrolls in the holes in walls, but also more challenges to the censors for readers are drawn to the forbidden, which becomes the secret, which becomes the mysterious. Often the best thing that happens to a book is to be banned. Sometimes it becomes a best-seller -- underground, newly "rare". Such irony: controversy sells, controversy does its own marketing ("contra"/against "verse"/speech). Speaking against is speaking for -- and often means being on a scroll.
