Media Consumption & Imagination By Edward Art
if you study Neville, you know he emphasizes the idea of creation—imagination as both a thing and a power with the ability to create internally within ourselves.
When you contrast our time with Neville's, ours is clearly different. It's been inflated, if you will. It's not that media didn't exist in Neville's time, but the media we have now is far more extreme and pervasive in our lives. This presents a challenge for us because, unlike Neville's era when media meant newspapers—primarily text without much visual component—our media consumption is fundamentally different. Reading requires something of you that visual consumption doesn't.
This observation comes from a personal experiment. I took a month off from mindlessly scrolling on my phone—not necessarily from posting, just from scrolling. I felt very different during that time. Then I came back to see how I would feel if I started scrolling again, and I noticed a few things.
First, doubts that I didn't have before started to arise—self-doubt and questioning myself that weren't there during my break. But it wasn't just anxiety. I started noticing that my imagination felt rigid, like it wasn't malleable anymore. I wasn't able to create as easily. This is just my experience, of course. Depending on your feed, things might be different for you. But I'm talking about the fundamental framework of what happens when we consume media.
The media we consume consists of finished images—completed visuals. You don't have to create anything inside your imagination anymore. You just scroll and you're given either an argument, someone fighting, or something happening on screen. The image is complete, and then you do it again and again and again. What happens is your imagination becomes a consumer rather than a creator within yourself.
Remember, imagination is the ability to create within ourselves. When it's just consuming and not creating, it almost feels pointless. The imagination becomes lifeless. Your inner world becomes dark and empty.
But there are things you can do to solve this issue. The point is to create inside ourselves, to use our imagination. So when you see a completed visual—like a video on your phone—revise it. Do something with what you just watched internally. Unlike reading, where you have to create something within yourself while piecing it together, visuals are already completed for you. Try to revise things when you hear or see them on your phone, just to practice creating within yourself.
Another thing you can do is set an intention to create for the sole purpose of creating—no other reason. Don't do it to try to change things all the time. Just focus on creating things within you. Start to gather the ability to produce and create within yourself. Create an idea, feel after the idea, take action within yourself, and your inner world will become more important. It will take on more tones of reality. It'll start to feel more real to you, become alive again, and you can become self-inspired rather than waiting for some external image to create for you.
That's really what's happening. The media we have now creates for us, and we no longer create within ourselves. Our awareness, which should be inward, is being externalized onto the phone. The phone gives us completed images, and when we come back to ourselves, we've been shaped by it without realizing it. We've been shaped to a degree.
Something on your phone—maybe not everything, but something—will be persuasive enough to make you think a certain way, to dream a certain way. We really are living in a world of assumptions. When you're on your phone, you're getting suggestions, assumptions, dreams given to you without it being explicitly stated. It's more of a demand, an intrusion, intruding upon you to dream this way. If it can't get you through intrusion, it'll get you through persuasion.
It may not be something you want to dream yourself. It might not be what you actually wanted, but you're just told to do it. If we know anything about human nature and observation, it's that people will bow to statues because they're told to. People will bow to gods they don't even know because they were told to. So it's very important to be aware of this fact—you don't want to make your imagination just a consumer, constantly consuming media. It needs to start creating again.
You'll find so much freedom when you realize creation should be done just for creation's sake, just because you can. That will allow you not only to get motivated but also to stay disciplined because the intention is always the same, and the goal is always the same: to create.
There's something I don't really like about the interpretation of Neville's work—not Neville himself, but the interpretation. I understand the sentiment about needing to change the outer world, Caesar's world, whatever you want to call it. But really, we need to focus on changing our inner worlds. If there's no one to change but self, then any other focus is pointless, right? It shouldn't matter as much. If there's nothing and no one to change but self, and I'm just simply consuming and not creating, then I'm not really changing myself. If there's nothing else to change, then I really shouldn't focus on much else.
Let's take the premise as true: no one to change but self. Then any other focus is less than self at that point. So I need to start imagining. If imagining creates reality, and no one to change but self—if you combine those two with "feeling is the secret"—then I change myself through feeling. If I want to create a different world for myself, I must create a different self for myself. I must create myself to be different. But we can't create if we're constantly consuming.
This is just something I noticed from my own experiment. I tried taking a month off, not watching anything, not scrolling at all. By the second week, I felt pretty good. When I came back to it—because you have to see how it's going to be when you come back—I just noticed my imagination felt limited out of nowhere, and it wasn't anything I was actively doing. It was just mindless consumption. The imagination atrophied because I stopped creating with it.
That's what I've noticed: if we don't start dreaming for ourselves, dreams will be put in us. We have to dream—we're dreamers. The same way we have to eat food, we have to dream. What we dream about is subject to change, either through ourselves or through external persuasion. Externalization of ideas can persuade us without our realizing it, and then we're on a certain track. We start expressing this without knowing we're expressing it, and then life turns a certain way. We wonder why this happened, where it came from, how it appeared. We forget. It's like we're gardeners, and when we see something sprouting in our garden that we don't want, we forget that we planted it.
Think about it. If you spend a whole day scrolling and I asked you which ones you remember, it's very hard to remember them, right? I don't think I'm alone in that. It's very hard to remember what you just watched. That tells me that the state of mind I'm in is almost like hypnosis. I'm just being receptive to it. I'm not really creating or thinking twice about what I just watched. I'm not doing anything with it. I'm merely consuming it, which I don't think is good because imagination is the ability not just to consume but to create. It must start creating.
That's why I'm saying you can revise what you just watched, regardless of whether you think it's going to happen or not. Don't think about outcomes—think about creation. Think about just creating. When you hear something, change it. If you want to change it, start to create on the inside rather than passively consuming on the inside. Don't let your inner world go dark just because it's easy. It's important. This is really important because we're supposed to be dreaming what we want, not what we're told to.
I know this was a bit different. I don't really have much else to say right now. I'll probably talk about this again in the future, but I just wanted to give a brief talk on this experiment I did with myself. Yeah, I'll probably bring this up in the future.
I don't really have anything else to say other than thank you guys for the support on the book. I do hope you're enjoying it, and I hope it frees you. I really do. I hope it frees you more than when you first started reading it. If you're interested, it's in the description. I'm going live tomorrow for the members later in the night. I'm going to have a drink and might talk about this, so if you're interested, check the description. But I'm curious about your thoughts on this idea—or more than just ideas, I want to hear your experience on this as well.
