Unknown and unstudied effects of media damaging our mental health?

You are part of the world, so the world affects you whole.

Let me first say, you have all seemed to miss the point completely. It is not only the advertising, but every form of media that I am referring to. Not only this, but it has nothing to do with the content outside of a potent random influence by nothing more than information that could have negative effects simply because of the way it's interpreted by the brain. Meaning, that with all this noise and visual stimulation, could unintended information, that is potential random and meaningless, be damaging to mental health? One example, could be the sharp rise in anxiety disorders, both new and previously known, in the past 20 years.

@CrackPipeChicken, isn't this just a generalized supposition on your part? How would you know if these effects have indeed remained "unstudied" for the past 20 years? Not all (serious) research findings get released that readily to the public much less the internet.

@weakwithwords Case in point? I've done some research and not found anything. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

#12 simply said, you ask if sitting 8 hours in in a park looking at the trees is better for the brain than sitting for 8 hours in front of the screen? I guess so, simply because of the elektrosmog.

Because of random information? May be.

Elron Hubbard once separated Reality into two states of order and chaos. and chaos into three states positive, neutral and negative chaos. (neutral chaos is the only state in which one can learn, happiness is the action of transforming something from a state of positive or negative chaos, which fights against being transformed, into the state of order)

so if this random information is positive or negative then it has always a damaging nature. If it is neutral, no problem.

But if you are asking science if pure information can have an effect on the body, the answer today will be a definite no, as pure information has no particles and therefore can have no effect, Placebo, case closed.

@CrackPipeChicken, I think it is in fact probably the case.

And it's important to limit one's exposition to the noise, and to instead surround ourselves with people and things that we like and that are meaningful to us.

As Innernight states everything we run into affects us and shapes us. We are made of the stuff in our environment, both materially and symbolically. And at least materially our genes are usually unaffected and keep a definite organization even with poor food (even though it can of course deteriorate). On the cultural side however there is no equivalent and the stuff we ingest affect our mental organization as well.

Ten years ago, I watched TV for the last time in my life, switched it off and gave the evil object to an old lady.

Of course to some extent we can "digest" the noise in the same way we digest food, keeping what is meaningful to us and discarding the rest. The problem is that the noisy environment in our case is usually combined with a noisy culture, and therefore a confused mind, so that we are not always equipped anymore to perform a proper digestion that serves us and keeps us healthy.

Actually the tolerance to noise is a sign of our confusion. When the mind is clear and well-organized, the noise appears for what it is and is avoided. It would be tolerated in the sense that it would not harm anymore. But it is not tolerated anymore in the sense that we don't have the patience anymore.

Stopping to watch TV live may be a symptom that this happened.

Here is an interesting related article- fairly brief:

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201001/the-decline-play-and-rise-in-childrens-mental-disorders

The gist of it: anxiety and depression have increased dramatically; this seems related to a rising sense that people have less control of their lives; and that in turn arises from a shift from goals that are intrinsic to those that are extrinsic -"...a general shift toward a culture of materialism, transmitted through television and other media."

Interesting stuff, Crackpipe!

The article is interesting in the data it provides, but its conclusion is that American schooling is at fault, which happens to be the topic of interest of the author -- and you can click on the link and buy his book about "free learning".

Schooling and the media are only vehicules for the larger culture. It's difficult to understand what people of a particular country have in their head, if you don't understand their culture and how it evolved in recent decades.

And of course it's difficult for American people to understand what their culture is, because they think through it and can't see it from the outside.

The mediatic noise is not the same in all cultures, and it has different effects depending on the culture.