Coercion: Enough Room to See, But Not Enough to Think
You see them everywhere; they’re in people’s living rooms, bedrooms, on desks, used as billboards, and have even found a place on the telephone. We use them to tell time, entertain, advertise, and even study with. They’re projection screens. They’ve only been with us for a little over a century and they’re already everywhere! As we boldly charge into the 21st Century, one can’t help but wonder how all this technology is affecting us. And what with the ever shrinking amount of time we have to ourselves to contemplate on the information we receive at an ever increasing rate, we’ve got less room in our head to sort it all out than ever before.
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A classic printing press from 1811.
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In the mid-1400’s, a German metalwork called Johannes Gutenberg innovated a way to print information on a mass scale. By making little metal stamps corresponding with each individual letter which could then be fit into a frame, Gutenberg was able to print and copy works at a rate so much faster than hand written documents, it can hardly be measured. His printing process created a new age of learning and literacy that no one had seen before. The average person, for a price that was relatively small compared to the cost of hand written books, could own their own copy of the Bible, or any other work for that matter. Not only did this make an environment conducive for an educational Renaissance, but it also herald in the first of all new form of information exchange that still thrives to this day: the political cartoon.
Now, anyone with the money and the know-how could motivate the public’s opinion in any direction they so desired (so long as they made a convincing case). With the thousands of anti-establishment cartoons and books being printed by Gutenberg’s printing press, world culture shifted dramatically, and caused the Church to begin a practice which was unthinkable in ages before; book burning. The war of ideas had been kicked into high-gear.
Literacy and education blossomed in the centuries after Gutenberg’s invention, creating ever more complex sciences and technologies. And in 1884, a student attending school in Neustadt created a machine whose descendants would change the world: the first television. Moving images projected onto screens had already been demonstrated two decades earlier, and celluloid film was being developed roughly the same time Paul Nipkow had created his invention. But his creation would eventually spawn an age where artificial moving images were brought to the average person in the comfort of their own home much like Gutenberg’s press took writing out of the Churches and put into the hands of commoners.
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Braun HF 1 Television
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, then one second of 24-fps film is worth 24,000 words, plus the audio to go along with it. By the end of the 1960’s, television had found its way into virtually every home in America. And with the advent of color television, audible and visual information was bombarding the brains of U.S. citizens with profound mental and emotional effects that few could have predicted. It’s now widely accepted that the opposition to the war in Vietnam was largely fueled by the images being sent back by reporters in the field. Americans would see their very own flesh and blood die right in their living rooms every night. The military paid a heavy price in the PR field in that era, but they were determined to never make that mistake again, as shown by the total an utter blackout of wartime images being transmitted via TV today.
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Apple II Personal Computer
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By the 1980’s, a whole new form of information delivery was introduced: the personal computer. Though simple and rudimentary at first, the average PC eventually enveloped the role that the typewriter, adding machine, clock, and board game had controlled in ages past. With the advent of the internet and more powerful CPUs, the roles of the television, radio, newspaper, magazine and telephone were slowly dominated by these small yet influential machines. It is said that we are going through another intellectual Renaissance because of the PC and Internet.
We spend longer and longer periods of time in front of these machines now and big business has recognized this. Today, there’re few websites that don’t offer some sort of service through monetary exchange, and even fewer that don’t include at least one advertisement. Everyone that sees a buck to be made want more and more of our attention, and the employment of these computers has driven the markets as well as the war of ideas into hyper-drive.
How do these projected images affect our brains? This has been a question I’ve wrestled with for most of my life. We’ve all heard the old saying, “TV rots the brain”. And I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has scoffed at this idea, but what if it has some basis in fact?
There’s no debate to the cultural effects that radio and television has on the citizenry, as can be seen with the panic of the War of the Worlds in 1938 and the protests of the Vietnam War. So, you have to wonder what the average advertisement, fictional story, news piece, opinion piece, music video and other form of entertainment that is projected by these means does to the consciousness both at the individual and mass level.
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Parts of the brain being excited by visual stimulus.
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In 2004, I began experimenting with my own nervous system to see if the effects that projected images had on the brain as opposed to images that used reflected light. The hypothesis was simple: light loses intensity when reflected off of objects; therefore images displayed by projection screens should a greater effect. It’s difficult to tell what the effects are when it comes to decision making and social responses without wider testing, so I relegated my experiments to the more immediate effects; namely, the effects on dreams and the retention/intensity of the “after-image” seen when the eyes are closed.
Both experiments were based on the same assumption: that the intense light coming from projection screens create a powerful “after-image” that stays in the mind for a period of time until the excitation of the visual parts of the brain subside. I believed that by utilizing these after-images, I could influence my own dreams to my own choosing.
In the after-image experiment, simple pictures, words, glyphs and other symbols were drawn using a paint program in solid black and white. The image was printed on a piece of paper and projected full-screen on the computer at 100% magnification. With the monitor turned off, the paper was taped to the monitor and stared at for a period of time between 30 seconds to 5 minutes. With eyes closed, the after-image appeared faintly against the darkness and lasted for a short period before fading away. The same was done with the image on the projection screen, using the same length of time. The image was far more intense than in the paper test, and lasted anywhere between 3 to 5 times longer.
In the dream experiment, similar images were used. Though, in this case, I decided to use the “sigil” form of images utilized by modern day “Magick” users. Words and symbols were combined to create an abstract symbol which is either familiar or unfamiliar. I decided to try to induce a wet dream by using the Latin word for passion – Eros – and form it into a symbol resembling a woman. The sigil was then displayed at full-screen and stared at for 15 minutes whereupon I immediately went to bed to go to sleep.
Though I failed to bring about the intended wet dream, the sigil woman I created was nonetheless part of the dream. In fact, her form in the dream was closely modeled after what the actual sigil looked like; instead of being a mass of white stripes she was instead a dark woman wearing all black with white stripes adorning her clothes. The dream contained no sex, but did invoke passion in the form of violence against a common enemy we encountered. Ironically, the dream turned to the use of computers shortly before I awoke. Similar dream experiments using paper images were not as effective.
As it is shown in the after-image experiment, the brain is excited by images for longer periods of time than those printed on paper. The mind therefore has less time to step back and analyze the information. And as the dream experiment showed, the power of images on the brain does indeed affect the sub-consciousness as well as waking consciousness. Despite the fact that my experiments lacked subjects outside of myself much less control subjects, the results were enough to convince me of the immense power that projection screens have on human consciousness.
As coercion, subliminal practices, and “magick spells” grow ever more sophisticated, we find ourselves making less rational and reasonable decisions but instead are being moved by images and sounds created by others with their own specific goals and agendas in mind. In some cases, these images and sounds are even hypnotic. But, even in hypnosis, the mind must be willing to accept coercion in order to comply with instructions. If we do not like the direction we are told to go, we still have the power to decide otherwise. But one question remains; do we know what is good for us?
