Unconscious Entertainment
Why does everyone talk that social media entertainment is bad, but book reading isn’t? 10 years ago, I remember none of the elders wanted youth to read non-education books. Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Thriller… none. Only to read something regarding your education is encouraged. 10 years goes by, everyone says to read any kind of book, but read. Guess, we just pick our poison.
Does that mean, 10 years later if we get a social media which is even more addictive, do we tell the kids to scroll Instagram rather than the other one. I suppose something like that already happens now. Instead of scrolling Instagram, people say I only scroll LinkedIn or Twitter (Reddit comes here and there too). Are we always picking our poison? Our way out is just delaying our addiction?
This is when I thought of the concept “Unconscious entertainment”. I worded it “Subconscious Entertainment” first, but there doesn’t seem to be any consciousness to this entertainment as I thought more about it. Let me explain.
Types of Entertainment
Here is an example. About couple of minutes ago, I had the book which I’ve been reading for a while lying beside me on a desk. Bright colours, on the face cover page, reminding me that I still need to read the book. Yet, every single time, I pick my phone rather and open some social media to scroll. If I'm bored of it, I’ll open WhatsApp to ping some friend. I’ll do all kinds of things to ignore the bright cover photo staring into my peripheral view reminding me that I’m ticking the time off. One moment I picked the phone, the next it’s dark outside. An hour passed just me scrolling on my phone picking apps to spend time. I was never conscious of the entertainment I got in that past hour. It’s all Unconscious.
As I regret scrolling on my phone, I pick the book and read 10 pages. 15 minutes pass by. That’s it. Though the book I’m reading might not be related to any education, I will remember the entertainment I got from it for at least 24 hours. That’s Conscious.
How to categorise
I started categorising all my entertainments into these two categories. Social media goes into “Unconscious Entertainment (UE)”. Book reading of some genres goes into “Conscious Entertainment (CE)”. Again, not all genres for me are CE. 7th book of Harry Potter goes into UE. Youtube is somewhere in the middle where it’s UE while watching a video, but CE while searching for the next one. Basically, which takes absolute minimal effort which your body can embed as a muscle memory is UE. Any effort your brain has to make, however small, should be CE.
Other factor is Judgement. Any media which makes me judge anything is UE. It could be me judging caste, religion, person, animal, task, etc. The moment my brain picks one side over than the other while consuming the media, it’s UE. Any media which makes me analytical is CE. Something like a documentary for me is purely CE.
Though the first type is fairly simple, the second type is the cream. We humans innately love to judge. In a court case, who needs justice. In a thriller movie, who should die. We crave to judge anything outside us, so we don’t conceive time to it. All judgement is UE.
Why categorise
That’s the real question I kept asking. I work for five days a week, shouldn’t I be scrolling social media for two days? Don’t I deserve that?
The truth is, we deserve entertainment but not submission. When you get entertained consciously, you realise that you are relaxed but also recognise that you are not submitted to the giants who manipulate your psychology. The moment you switch to UE, you are at the mercy of the social media algorithm. And companies have burnt enough billions to create such intricate formulas to show you the most compelling content every half a second.
The culprit is, the question “Don’t I deserve a bit of Instagram?” The hard answer is, You Don’t. Though I know I’m dipping into the controversial waters, that’s the hard answer I’ve realised. Cause, social media itself made us ask that question in the first place. You are never the controller. You are the slave.