Counter-digital resistance: the Awe Exercise to foster environmental Awereness
Awe offers hormonal stimuli unknown in the digital world, but (hopefully) sufficiently strong for withdrawal.
Deep reading seems to be a major exercise in counter-digital media literacy. As McLuhan once said, “Phonetic literacy is the only detribalizing technology known to man.” However, there is another powerful counter-digital technique, and it is not literate but oralist in essence—the gaze at the beauty of nature and the awe it produces.
In The Anxious Generation (2024), Jonathan Haidt tells the story of his colleague Dacher Keltner, with whom he co-authored a paper on the emotion of awe in 2003. Years later, Haidt listened to Keltner’s podcast in which he spoke about how “awe walks” helped him cope with grief after his brother died from cancer. Awe, Keltner found, comes when we encounter something so vast or beautiful that our minds cannot easily contain it. It makes us feel small, but in a way that comforts rather than threatens.
Haidt decided to add a session on awe and beauty to his Flourishing class at New York University. He asks his undergrads to listen to the podcast and go on an awe walk. “The written reflections they turned in for that week’s homework were among the most beautiful I’ve seen in my 30 years as a professor,” writes Haidt.
Many of them had walked the same streets for years without really seeing them, but this time they moved slowly, without distraction. Some noticed old stone carvings on buildings they had never looked at before. “But the most powerful reports came from those who walked through parks.” One student sat beneath cherry trees in full bloom, watching the light move across petals and water. Several students wrote that “before their awe walks, they rarely took the time to absorb the beauty of the world around them.” One student described how the park suddenly felt alive, as if the world had been waiting for her to finally pay attention. The worries she carried every day loosened their grip, and a quiet calm took their place. Students noticed that they felt lighter, more open, less trapped in their own heads.
In her 2021 Dopamine Nation, another important book for fighting digital addiction, Dr. Anna Lembke recommends, essentially, an awe exercise, too. “Find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to,” she writes.
Awe is important because it pulls us out of the prison of our worries, deadlines, and anxieties. In awe, the world expands, and anxiety recedes, making room for wonder, calm, and connection.
Nature is especially powerful in delivering awe because we evolved to feel at home in it: trees, water, sunlight, and wind provided the basic sensory stimuli for our species. But in the age of constant digital stimulation, people rarely give themselves the time or silence to feel awe. The awe walk is therefore not just an activity; it is a small act of reclaiming attention and presence. It’s reclaiming the agency of contemplation by putting yourself in the midst of beauty.
From the standpoint of psychology, awe is the emotion of experiencing the beauty of something bigger than a person’s everyday concerns, most commonly arising from contemplating the beauty of nature. But from the standpoint of media ecology, this awe comes from “proper” environmental immersion, when all mediation that skews the purity and beauty of natural perception is put away.
In his 2017 book Media Ecology: An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition, Lance Strate shares a gem he found in Max Frisch’s 1959 novel Homo Faber: “Technology is the art of never having to experience the world.” In fact, nearly everything we feel or experience is mediated one way or another, and therefore everything we experience is, in fact, our media. Moreover, in the past decade, digital immersion has displaced even the mediated experience of the real world—with experiencing the screen and what’s in it.
So, when we go back to actually “experiencing the world,” we strip away technological mediation and restore the unmediated, naked perception of our surroundings. This alone makes the awe exercise a powerful counter-digital cognitive technique.
Deeper in media ecology: the awe exercise is a training in reactivating the natural sensorium, as in the sensory mode of orality—but with the detached reflection we acquired through literacy.
Oralist Homer knew beautiful wine or armor; Plato, already affected by the alphabet, discovered beauty. Intellectual work of conception can come only on the basis of a sensory work of perception. How else would Plato have discovered beauty if not by rethinking, or “rebelling” against, the “poetical” worldview of the Homerian (=oral, tribal) mindset, the mindset of the prisoners in Plato’s Cave allegory, where they can only see “shadows” of real things, given to them through their senses. Now prisoners of the digital cave have to return sometimes to Plato’s cave and admire the dance of the natural world’s shadows, projected onto their sensorium, in order to reinvent Plato’s beauty out of Homer’s beautiful things.
The awe exercise is a peculiar oral-literate—postliterate—cognitive technique, allowing the activation of the sensorium but under a detached and distanced supervision of abstraction. The awe exercise confronts and dismantles digital orality not with literacy, but with an orality-type mode of perception framed by literacy-induced reflection. This is essentially the core of another powerful counter-digital technique, “mindfulness,” very popular lately in Silicon Valley and beyond.
Why does reactivating the senses for enjoying nature disenchant people from the digital trance? Let’s consider digital orality as a mode of immersive perception that inherits from both oral and literate perception. In digital, we stay physically alone and detached, as in reading and writing, but digitally involved with an entire alternative world, as in orality. You can clearly see this in many people on public transport, for example.
Therefore, a good method to break the digital enchantment is to reactivate the natural sensorium by immersing ourselves back in nature. Seemingly oralist, this way of immersion is deliberate and controllable (preliterate oralists did not have much of a choice—they were naturally immersed in nature; we do have a choice of immersion). But most importantly, an oralist-type but literacy-framed immersion in nature reinstates the natural sensorium and embodied experience—something that digital media relentlessly deprive us of.
I can’t write about anything media without referring to McLuhan, can I? He had an insight for every possible case of media analysis. Did he have something to say about awe and its role in media awareness? He did!
In The Mechanical Bride (1951), Marshall McLuhan offered a metaphor for escaping a deadly environment, borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841). In Poe’s tale, a sailor’s boat is drawn into a mile-wide maelstrom. Though terrified, the sailor is at the same time awed by the spectacle as “a manifestation of God’s power” and “became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself.” As the boat is pulled deeper into the vortex, he notices that some objects descend more slowly than others. He abandons the boat and clings to a barrel. The boat is swallowed by the abyss, but when the vortex subsides, the sailor rises to the surface and is rescued by a fishing boat.
Thus, the sailor managed to escape the maelstrom by accepting its power and observing its patterns. Or, as McLuhan put it, the “sailor saved himself by studying the action of the whirlpool and by co-operating with it. […] It was this amusement born of his rational detachment as a spectator of his own situation that gave him the thread which led him out of the Labyrinth.”
Media ecology is a detached study of immersions. McLuhan used the sailor metaphor from Poe’s story on many occasions to highlight the awe-inspired reverence before the power of the media maelstrom, but also the detachment of observation needed to stay aware of its effects in order to cooperate with them.
Often, he interpreted the sailor’s story in the context of the anti-environment, another favored McLuhan’s theme. The fish is not aware of the water it swims in; to recognize its immersion in the water, it must be pulled out. McLuhan suggested that artists are especially good at creating anti-environments and disrupting our environmental habituation. An anti-environmental push (or pullout) is indeed a good way to recognize the perceptual numbness of digital immersion and switch the gears. Paradoxically, from this perspective, becoming awed means becoming aware. The right awe creates awereness—that is, awareness awakened by awe.
Finally, at the level of neurophysiology, learning to receive non-digital excitement rewires the digitally seduced and altered brain back into the natural state of hormonal reward from different activities. The awe of natural beauty, the awe of communion, the awe of sports (and sports themselves, as they produce not just awe but direct chemical interventions of “muscle joy”) helps our bodies access different sources of hormonal rewards, leading to media freedom.
Awe offers hormonal stimuli unknown in the digital world, but (hopefully) sufficiently strong for withdrawal. The hormonal nature of reward reinforcement from the click and from natural awe is different. The click promises minuscule but instant and endless rewards for tiny efforts, while awe is a powerful emotion requiring the significant effort of digital withdrawal and refocusing attention toward surrounding beauty. But isn’t this natural beauty beautiful? And what will the endless but ephemeral reward of the click give you at the end of the day anyway?
Here is how Haidt calls for practicing awe:
If we want awe to play a larger and more beneficial role in our lives, we need to make space for it. As a result of doing my own awe walk the same week my students did them, I now take my AirPods out of my ears when I’m walking in any park or natural setting. I no longer try to cram in as many audiobooks and podcasts, at 1.5 times normal speed, as my brain can receive. As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas. Without phones.
“We need to take back control of our inputs,” concludes he.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
