Dreams, Media Ecology and Digital Dementia
Dreams, Digital "Booting", and Digital Dementia
Digital dementia is a concept coined by German neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer, in his book "Digital Demenz" (2012). The neurophilosophical concept has increasingly gained cultural currency, in understanding the psychopathological "social influence" of human-computer interaction.
In 2011 CDC (Centre of Disease Control) posted a tongue in cheek webpage; "Preparedness 101 : zombie pandemic". July 2022 in Canada, the telecom provider "Rogers", had a communication outage, leaving over 12 million internet customers without service, for 15 hours. The disruption of services, caused serious social confusion, and sparked a critical national debate.
Spitzer has discussed his concerns, about the "psychopathological effects, and influence of digital media" on children's cognitive-behavioural development. The much debated concepts of "philosophical zombie's", and "digital zombies", who lack consciousness, is on-going. Our philosophical distinctions between the "real world", and the digital "virtual world", have increasingly become blurred, and have in fact, in many cases completely broken down.
The psychophysical "effects of media consumption", including electronic media, and social media on dreams, is well documented, in the canon of dream research.
From a media ecology perspective, our collective communal "dream world" communication patterns, have been radically changed, and altered in the last seventy years. A watershed moment in our planet's history of mass communication, was the launching of the first earth satellite Sputnik.
As a psychotherapist, twenty seven years ago (1998), I was confronted with my first case of an "Internet love triangle". Today, we find in our virtual dream world of "media consumption", the digital phantasmagoria of the Walkman, cell-phones, social media (facebook), video gaming, and computers (AI) to name a few.
Raymond Barglow "The Crisis of the Self in the Age of Information: Computers, Dolphin's and Dreams" (1994) reports a dream (p36); "Friends want to use my computer, so they type the letters "b2" to begin. But what happens is that the printer starts to print out garbage.
Irritated I rush into the room and abort the process, explaining that the start-up command is "b," not "b2". The "b" stands for "boot the system." I tell my friends that I could write a simple front-end program that would intercept the command "b2" before it gets executed. This way the trouble would get headed off before it had a chance to make everything go haywire."
This dream, over 30 years old, enacts the "mind" as a programmable system governed by command execution and censorship, merging programmer, biocomputer, and psychoanalytic metaphors. The dreamer's intervention to intercept and correct an erroneous command reflects the "program architect" role-akin to the Architect in The Matrix and Ariadne in Inception-designing and defending psychic space to prevent disruptive output ("garbage out").
Symbolic "virtual digital architectural" cognitive processes of booting, aborting, and "command" (conative) building error-intercepting routines parallel the Freudian censor, John Lilly's "metaprogramming", and Young's brain programs (Programs of the Brain).
Pragmatically, the narrative "oneirically" models how self-regulation, boundary defense, and error-correction are enacted through conscious metaprograms, ensuring coherent psychic function and protecting the concept of self, against informational or social unconscious chaos.
From a media ecology and dream research perspective, we also know that "Project Alamo" had an "influence" on the political choices of American voters, in the 2016 Presidential election. Welcome to the AI mass media "influencing machine". For Marshall McLuhan, the "electronic age" changes the way humans perceive....
From a music perspective, are we coming to the "End of Time"...?
Mark Goldhagen, September 4, 2025