Michigan Minds Podcast: Exploring the Impact of Mindless Media Exposure

Jan Van den Bulck, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts. His research focuses on involuntary and incidental media effects, and explores how entertainment media affect our perception of the real world. In this episode of Michigan Minds, Van den Bulck discusses how watching TV impacts our knowledge of various fields including law enforcement and emergency medicine, and talks about the relationship between media use and sleep.

[@ClassPunkOnRumbleAndSubstack]

In my opinion, the perception of objective beauty, the perception of story, the need for both, the AEDP Change Triangle, and the meaningfulness of virtues, are likely somewhat the result of complex shared genetics between human beings, and play a role in the pursuit of media. It's best to say media is mindless with a clearly-stated conceptual model of values, that attempt in non-absolutism to define mindlessness with increasing complexity and clarity for outcomes of greater wellbeing; for the best foundational understanding these values must be life values, and the Lindy effect points to one beginning of that pursuit as the study of probable similarities between different historical takes on virtues. To paraphrase John Vervaeke, constructive change has the most potential when it is whatever a working and physiologically balanced ecology of changes/practices looks like for the individual, because that matches the complexity of the potentially destructive forces in the individual and their environment resulting in more suppression of the latter forces.

[@ShakespeareCafe]

Umberto Eco called this out