Distraction Therapy – Media and the Work of Reconstruction

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Consumer culture has reduced media to distraction and metrics. The metamodern task is reconstruction: reshaping media as a space where creative expression dislodges us from certainty and opens new horizons. Radio Lear embraces this work, treating sound and art as symbolic labour rather than commodities. Reconstruction is not a return to the past but a renewal of depth and resonance, where media becomes a threshold to meaning and transcendence.

If the disintegration of symbolic reference points leaves us suspended in the slipstream of signs, then the next step is to ask how we might re-anchor meaning. This is the ground of reconstruction, and it is here that media, when approached as art and practice, becomes essential.

For decades, consumer culture has reduced media to a marketplace of attention. The value of a song, a broadcast, or a post is measured only in metrics—likes, clicks, revenue. In this reduction, the media environment itself has become one-dimensional: an endless circulation of content designed to reaffirm the predictable, to lock us into the comfort of certainty.

The metamodern task is otherwise. Having passed through the deconstruction of postmodernism, we now face the responsibility of renewal. Reconstruction requires us to restore media to its role as a bearer of meaning, not merely as a commodity. The goal is not affirmation or distraction, but dislodgement: to be shifted from the inertia of our routines, to encounter what is unexpected, to be called into dialogue with what transcends.

Art and media, in this sense, are not about reinforcing what we know but about opening us to what we do not yet know. They create a horizon where the numinous can return. They resist the flattening logic of consumer metrics by insisting that value is found in resonance, in disruption, in the shock of recognition.

Radio Lear steps into this work as a platform for emergent sound and symbolic reconstruction. It is not a channel for distraction, but for re-attunement. By experimenting with sound, voice, and music, we seek to re-root media in the soil of creative expression, so that it may once again serve as a threshold to meaning rather than an engine of consumption.

Reconstruction is not nostalgia. It does not seek to restore the old symbols uncritically. Rather, it means weaving from fragments new constellations, grounding them in lived experience and creative imagination. It means giving form to the transcendent dimensions that make life bearable, even beautiful.

The work of artists and media practitioners now is to engage in this reconstruction consciously. To treat the media not as a product, but as a field of symbolic labour, where what we make together reshapes how we see, how we feel, how we live. In doing so, we begin to fashion the cultural infrastructure of a society that values depth over distraction, meaning over metrics, resonance over repetition.