This article was commissioned by Jiemian (for reprints, please contact Jiemian) and was adapted from an earlier article. Jiemian is a very good new media outlet that I have long followed, so being able to contribute was an honor; it feels much better than publishing in traditional newspapers or magazines.
The original title at submission was “Could Being Addicted to VR Be a Kind of Salvation?” When it was published, it was changed to “Can VR Save Us from Our Smartphone Addiction?,” which is a bit more precise, so I will use that title here as well. The content was slightly altered in publication, so I am posting the original version here.
Looking Down and Burying One’s Head — The Merits and Faults of Addiction
Recently, Chengde in Hebei installed “lying-down traffic lights” to save the “heads-down tribe,” and reportedly the effect has been quite good.
Indeed, hanging our heads and playing with our phones at any time and in any place has already become a normal state for contemporary people: we need to look at our phones when eating, when chatting, on the way to and from work, from time to time when in class or at work, and the first thing after getting up and before going to sleep is also to look at our phones……
Being addicted to the phone seems to be a bad thing, but what exactly is bad about it? One simple line of thought is this: since you are addicted to one thing, you are bound to neglect other things. For example, if a parent is addicted to the phone, they won’t have the time to take care of the child; if you are addicted to the phone at work, it will affect your job; if a child is addicted to the phone, they won’t have the time to study properly……
But this phenomenon—that being “addicted” to something necessarily leads to neglecting other things—need not always be bad. For example, from a parent’s point of view, if a child is addicted to studying, burying their head in homework all day and not having time to play, most people would probably see that as a good thing. Or, take Chen Jingrun burying himself in mathematics and having no time for socializing, or Yuan Longping burying himself in the fields and having no time for family—these are all things we regard as good, even great.
These forms of “burying one’s head” are also a matter of being addicted to one thing while neglecting others. Why is it that people who bury themselves in research deserve praise, while people who keep their heads down playing on their phones are criticized? One simple line of thought is that activities like studying and scientific research are useful, whereas playing on the phone is pure waste of time; therefore, being addicted to good activities is a good thing, and being addicted to bad activities is a bad thing.
But whether an activity is good or bad does not seem to have any absolute standard either. Historically, many of the things scientists, artists, and inventors engaged in were not well regarded at the time; they were seen as fanciful or as neglecting one’s proper duties, and one could not see any practical use in them. Playing on the phone may even have a bit of economic value, while many activities in research and invention have really gone down the drain, yielding nothing at all. Moreover, the things that primary and secondary school students bury themselves in studying often have little practical use beyond coping with the college entrance exam.
It can thus be seen that it is somewhat arbitrary to evaluate, in a utilitarian way, which things one should be addicted to and which one should not. We may as well set aside such one-dimensional evaluations of good/bad or useful/useless, and rethink the different tendencies of addiction.
Focus and Drift — The Biases of Addiction
Among the heads-down tribe, “the phone” is the medium of addiction rather than its content. Even though people are all looking down at their phones, some are playing mobile games, some are chasing TV dramas, some are reading novels, some are browsing Moments…… This phenomenon itself already suggests that, as far as addiction is concerned, the medium itself may be more worthy of attention than the content.
As for the different biases of media, media theorists Innis and McLuhan offered several dimensions of measurement, and these theoretical tools can also be used to analyze the technologies of the new era. Innis, for example, pointed out that media have two biases, toward “time” and toward “space”: clay tablets, for instance, are time-biased (because they endure for a long time), whereas papyrus is space-biased (because it spreads rapidly). McLuhan, meanwhile, measured media by asking which senses a technology promotes or suppresses—for example, the printed book is visually centered, whereas speech leans more toward an auditory-tactile unfolding.
These thinkers, who are referred to as part of media ecology, suggest a distinctive attitude for understanding a technology: bracket its content and attend to its form. For example, we need not first care whether people read the Bible or recipes, science or novels, in printed books; instead, we care about the characteristics brought by the form of the printed book as a medium itself.
From this perspective, we do not need to rank reading history and literature books higher or lower than reading martial-arts novels in our addiction to books; they are all dealings with printed books. By contrast, the different biases between reading books and watching television are much more worthy of attention.
McLuhan, Postman, and others have already provided some concepts for analyzing media from the perspective of form. For example, some media more strongly promote “focus,” while others induce “drift.”
The difference between film and television lies precisely here. Film is a medium of focused immersion, while television in more situations is casual and inattentive. Their difference is determined not entirely by clarity or screen size, but by different usage contexts. In a movie theater, the room is darkened, and you are first stripped of all other information, so that you focus on the one direction of the film. Television, by contrast, is often set up in the living room or bedroom at home, where the surrounding environment is always open; therefore, watching TV does not forbid conversation, and in fact people may talk about it at any moment or simply lose interest and do something else. In many cases, the TV at home even becomes a kind of background noise: people just leave it on while doing other things, without paying any attention to the program itself at all.
Books, especially printed books, are also media that demand focus. Their characteristic is that when you read, you need a quiet environment that excludes interference from other information besides the book. Spoken communication, by contrast, is usually drift-like. Even when you are chatting with someone you care about very much, an open environment is often still required—for example, eating together, walking together, looking at the moon and counting the stars together, and so on. Even in face-to-face focused conversations such as meetings, people never focus only on speech itself; instead, various “small movements” are constantly mixed in, bringing vision and bodily motion into play. If you try as hard as possible to exclude all outside interference—for example, locking people in a tiny dark room with their hands tied while making them converse verbally—it would feel very oppressive.
McLuhan believed that these biases promoted by media are not limited to their relevant usage scenarios, but also affect other aspects of our lives. For instance, printing promoted the development of private space and the rise of visual centrism. When we leave books behind and look at other things, the detached, calm, and objective attitude cultivated by print culture is still influencing us at every moment.
Postman believed that the rise of television was a dismantling of print culture, because television encourages people to abandon “focus.” In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he pointed out that television strongly cultivates the ability to switch emotions rapidly: one second you are feeling sad for the suffering of a group of African refugees, the next second you burst out laughing at some American celebrity’s embarrassment, and the next second you are worrying anxiously about next week’s weather…… This is our daily state when watching TV news: we can no longer settle down and focus on a single issue to dig deeply and contemplate it, but are pulled at any moment by fragmented emotions.
Smartphones seem to intensify this state of “absent-mindedness.” The switching of “focus” becomes ever faster, and “scrolling” is the most common state when using a phone. Although people are always staring at the phone, they can no longer stay focused on any one piece of content for long; instead, they have become accustomed to quickly “scrolling” past any content whatsoever. So much so that even after putting down the phone, in activities that require focus such as reading or listening to lectures, the new generation is increasingly losing the ability to “concentrate with all one’s mind.” This is exactly why many people regard the phone as a monstrous flood.
Phones and VR — A Contest Among New Technologies
How can we struggle a little in the face of the smartphone tide? Many people pin their hopes on old activities, such as going outdoors for spring outings, or reading books, or even educating the next generation through traditional ritual and the reading aloud of classics, or simply forcing young people away from their phones by orders, even confiscation. But I do not hold out much hope for these strategies. Their fundamental disadvantage lies less in outdated content than in outdated form. It is precisely because new media such as smartphones have caused traditional ways of life to collapse across the board that trying to prop up these toppled forces again is undoubtedly hopeless.
It is like when a dynasty has been overthrown: for a while, imperial orphan heirs may become hot commodities, and warlords everywhere come to support some orphan or another so they will have a legitimate pretext for uprising. But if you think the restoration of the old dynasty really has hope, then you are being far too naive.
At times of dynastic change, and at times of technological transition, what truly competes is not new technology against old technology, but different new technologies against one another, the various faces of new technology competing with one another. An old dynasty collapses before a new force like dry rot before a gale, and this situation makes many people feel “pessimistic,” as though human effort were feeble and there were no way to turn fate around. But if we turn our gaze toward the future, and do not expect to defy heaven and change our命运, but instead carefully distinguish among the various new forces, then this may not be a matter with no room for maneuver after all. After all, the smartphone is not the only new trend.
But unfortunately, those who see the phone as a monstrous flood often harbor the same hostility toward all emerging electronic media. As a result, they go in the wrong direction for resistance, and futilely throw themselves into the movement to restore the old dynasty. They fail to see the multiple possibilities contained in new technology, and fail to see that “electronic media” are not always an ironclad whole, nor are “video games” of only one type.
Perhaps the series of electronic media represented by smartphones really is very “dangerous,” but the way out is not resistance and rejection, but balance and complementarity; not a retreat to tradition, but the fostering of a new counterweight.
For example, perhaps VR is one major force standing in opposition to smartphones?
We have mentioned that the bias brought by a certain medium has much to do with its usage context. The usage context of the phone is fragmented, snatching time whenever possible, anytime and anywhere; this is the characteristic of what is called the “mobile internet.” The typical usage context of VR, however, is the exact opposite. The typical application scenario for VR is precisely “not moving.” Even if you buy a lightweight all-in-one headset, you would not be using it at any moment on the bus or in front of your desk, and it is even less possible to put it on and take a look during the brief wait at a red light. The most typical application scenario is one’s own home, or a dedicated venue, including commercial VR体验馆 or VR classrooms in schools—similar to today’s internet cafés and school computer rooms. In other words, the usage context of VR basically overlaps with that of earlier desktop computer towers, and is vastly different from the context of smartphones.
In fact, the “not moving” group—the “homebodies”—are also products of electronic media influence, and the history of the “otaku” is even earlier than that of the “heads-down tribe.” But their reputation is likewise not very good, seeming to be just as guilty of neglecting one’s proper duties. Yet if we bracket judgments about whether content is useful or useless, and instead pay attention to form, then the difference between otaku and the heads-down tribe may be greater than the difference between otaku and research maniacs.
Being addicted in both cases, the addiction of otaku and research fanatics leans more toward immersion and focus, while the addiction of the heads-down tribe and TV addicts perhaps leans more toward getting lost and drifting away.
The world of mathematics, the world of literature, and the electronic virtual world under VR technology can all allow a person to immerse themselves in an independent kingdom that contains within it a rich and self-sufficient structure of meaning. In relation to such worlds, skimming over the surface yields little enjoyment; one must concentrate and go deep in order to move through them with ease. But television or the phone, rather than luring people to immerse themselves deeply, lure people into “not immersing,” making them continuously pass over and leave one meaning structure after another, encouraging superficial and improvisational participation rather than wholehearted engagement in a relatively stable semantic space. The tendency toward fragmentation runs counter to the spirit of otaku.
Of course, VR technology, like phones and television, is not a monolith either, and my comparison of them as wholes is rather crude. But at least in broad tendency, “immersion” is undoubtedly the keyword for VR. Yet unlike books, films, or even traditional domains of immersion such as astronomy, physics, and so on, the immersive mode of VR is not about excluding the other senses and letting vision reign alone; rather, it attempts to draw all of a person’s senses into a self-sufficient world of meaning. The distinctive significance of such a medium still awaits our observation and disclosure.
Excessive focus or excessive drift are both forms of mental derangement; we do not expect any one bias to completely overwhelm another, but we can hope for a future that is more diversified, with different biases balancing one another.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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