In some ways, Eris, my eighth book, is grounded in ideas that initially energized my first novel, Media Therapy (2000).
Back then I was an earnest student of McLuhan’s Understanding Media, a visionary work regarding the cultural and cognitive effects of electronic communications. Stepping into his impossibly large footsteps wasn’t an explicit goal, but there was a lot more to say about how emerging digital and multimedia culture was changing us – and not for the better.
For Media Therapy, I developed a group of “media diseases” that involved satirically reworking the pseudo-scientific language of the bible of the therapy world, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that lists the billing codes for hundreds of mental health disorders. Here’s a taste:
Bandwidth Separation Mania – social or occupational impairment following any delay in access to a media product or service
Multi-Tasking Tic – inefficient time management resulting from the simultaneous use of multiple communications services
Porn Media Arousal Dysfunction – the inability to be aroused or participate in sexual relations without stimulation from a media source
Browser Rage – inexplicable anger accompanied by a persistent or recurrent feeling of being detached from your mental processes or estranged from your body arising from excessive computer use
Main Character Grandiosity – referring to yourself in the third person, as if the hero an action movie – a common disorder among celebrities
You can see the fun I had with this – although, I’m not alone in saying that media-based illnesses are a serious matter today. It’s nice to think I was ahead of my time. But no longer. The wellbeing gurus on bestseller lists and across the podcast landscape have caught up. New terms keep entering the language for taking that story forward. Like doomscrolling.
For Eris, my interest in media illness has turned to the possibilities for rebellion against the psychological dynamics of digital life. It asks, if someone really believed digital addiction to be an evil against the public good, how far would they go to destroy the corporatized purveyors and platforms that feed it?
Larry Gaudet is an award-winning novelist who is also a corporate writer, management consultant, and TV scriptwriter. He provides pro bono counsel to Médecins Sans Frontières, an art therapy institute in Hangzhou, and the Kingsburg Coastal Conservancy. He lives in Toronto and Nova Scotia. Learn more here.