---
I now close my three-part series on “the medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism about the effects that new technologies, a.k.a. mediums, have on society. (See Parts I & II on Feb. 23 and 25. By the way, I purposely use mediums as the plural rather than media, so readers will not think McLuhan was referring only to the communications media.)McLuhan’s classic example of a “medium” was the light bulb, an invention with a profound “message,” to be sure. Other examples include the phonetic alphabet, printing press, steam engine, telegraph, radio and television, and the instant replay rule. The list is endless.
Once aware of the “McLuhan equation” I seem to find it everywhere, and the picture is not always pretty; unanticipated consequences seldom are. For example—
◘ Automobiles provide us with greater mobility, but they also bring traffic deaths and deprive us of exercise. (When I lived in Baton Rouge I had to drive 500 yards to the grocery store because there are literally no sidewalks or pedestrian crossings in that part of town. For the same reason I had to drive to the office, a mere 600 yards away. Nobody walks in Baton Rouge. No wonder obesity is a problem.)◘ C-SPAN and cable news channels were meant to keep us better informed and provide “transparency” in the political process. Instead they gave us information overload, a sound-bite mentality, and what filmmaker Eugene Jarecki called the “radio-static noise of hyperbole on all sides.” (NYT Magazine, 2/4/11.)
◘ Televised presidential debates were meant to enlighten the voting public. Instead they led to image being more important than substance.
Among voters who heard the debate on the radio, Nixon prevailed against Kennedy. We have expected this kind of theater ever since. Are we better informed? I doubt it, and I know we're none the wiser!Of course, there are some positive effects. Twitter and Facebook may have played key roles in the toppling of autocratic governments in the Middle East. And the Internet made it possible for me to do research for two textbooks without having to go to a library even once.
But in general I agree with Chuck Klosterman who wrote in August of 2008, “the mass media is (a) too large, (b) mostly bad, and (c) getting worse.”* He was of course speaking about communications media, just one type of medium in McLuhan’s eyes. But his point is worth noting. In the same article he says,
The mass media is the single most detrimental entity within the United States right now, and it's having the exact opposite effect of its theoretically intended one--it's making people less informed and less complete. It is much more harmful than I originally perceived. But it's also more interesting than I initially realized, because the people who are most acutely aware of this problem are the same people making the problem worse. Bloggers blog about how blogging ruins their lives. Newspapers deliver insignificant reports on the declining significance of newspapers. Entourage [the HBO TV series] is a commentary on shallow celebrity-driven entertainment such as Entourage. A writer named Nicholas Carr wrote a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly about how the Internet is making it difficult for people to concentrate on long essays, [and it] was subsequently published on the Internet. I'm writing a column in a magazine that could essentially be read as an essay against magazines, and I don't think anyone will find that strange.
No, I don’t find that strange. I’m blogging right now about the unanticipated consequences of technologies like blogging. But of course I rationalize by saying that I’m raising awareness. I want readers to realize that without mediums like cable TV and the Internet to report what they say, post turtles† like Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin would never have become the phenomena that they are. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart might be doing standup comedy. Glenn Beck might be teaching Sunday school or holding tent revival meetings.
Their content is mostly irrelevant. They get attention not so much because of the substance of what they say but because they sell air time and newspapers, increase viewer share and advertising revenues. The McLuhanesque message is the fact that millions of people tune in and get worked into a frenzy. Go watch Network again: it's as relevant today as it was in 1976, maybe even more so. There’s an entire industry that creates this phenomenon. An industry that—like the media conglomerate in Network—is designed as much to create news as to report on it. This is a fact of life: the medium creates its own message.
When I keep this in mind, I can screen out the hyperbolic static and background noise. When I hear or read about a politician (or their spokesperson) saying something inane at a news conference, I can remind myself that they’re just playing to the cameras, that this is not real policy-making; it’s just the message of the medium.
At least I hope that's all it is.
# # #
____
† Imagine a turtle sitting on top of a fence post. It didn’t get there by itself. It doesn’t know how to get down. It can only point in one direction. And you wonder what nitwit put it up there in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment