Abusing ourselves to death: Did Twitter create Donald Trump?

Advertisement

Donald Trump’s war on media, which is an extension of his war on perceived elites, ramped up on Friday night:

23t

Someone has probably already written this but I’m wondering today whether it was Donald Trump that uses Twitter or Twitter that uses Donald Trump? By this I do not only mean that our Donald outflanked old media and mobilised social media to get elected, though he certainly did that. I mean to ask did the rise of social media as a new commons itself create Donald Trump? From Wikipaedia:

The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in any message it would transmit or convey, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

The phrase was introduced in McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.[1] McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

McLuhan frequently punned on the word “message”, changing it to “mass age”, “mess age”, and “massage”; a later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which is said to have been a printing error.

For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled “the scale and form of human association and action”.[2] Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed “the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.”[3] Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from “lineal connections” to “configurations”.[3]

Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the “content of any medium is always another medium”[4] – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph.

McLuhan understood “medium” in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.”[4]

Likewise, the message of a newscast about a heinous crime may be less about the individual news story itself — the content — and more about the change in public attitude towards crime that the newscast engenders by the fact that such crimes are in effect being brought into the home to watch over dinner.[5]

Hence in Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.[6] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time.[5] As society’s values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions[5] that we are not aware of.

Advertisement

The characteristics of Donald Trump are perfectly suited to the limited characters of Twitter and abbreviated social media: truncated; truculent; reductive, black and white. The question is which came first? The President of the medium?

In his fabulous work, Amusing ourselves to Death, Neil Postmen posited that it was the rise of TV that spawned America’s first entertainment president:

Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television’s entertainment value as a present-day “soma“, by means of which the citizens’ rights are exchanged for consumers’ entertainment.

The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that “form excludes the content,” that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and “news of the day” becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.

Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and “talking hairdos” bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to “sell” lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate’s ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase “now this”, which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.

Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the Information-action ratio.

Drawing on the ideas of media scholar Marshall McLuhan — altering McLuhan’s aphorismthe medium is the message“, to “the medium is the metaphor” — he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge. The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are simply weakened by televised viewing. Accordingly, reading, a prime example cited by Postman, exacts intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement. Moreover, as television is programmed according to ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.

He also repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, being the Age of Reason, was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan’s abilities as an entertainer.

Advertisement

If TV created Ronald Reagan then perhaps Twitter rewired out minds and recalibrated our values to be receptive to Donald Trump, with the policies to match: blunt; abusive and self-centered, such as we sometimes see in Trump supporters even in MB comments.

This line of thought runs deeper. The immediate response to the Trump Administration has been to turn to the liberal press, progressive or other name, into a carbon copy of the Twittersphere. Sure, its chosen heroes and villains are different but the structure of its delivery is now identical to its long loathed nemesis in the conservative “Fox News” press. Now it too assumes its values are absolute and proceeds to demonise opponents, reduce news flow to repetitive condemnation, over-egg crises, dismiss contrary evidence and generally just abuse its opposite.

We are now caught in a battle of mainstream Twittering trolls as all media assumes the restrictive lineaments of social media: abusing ourselves to death

Advertisement

None of this is to downplay the key driver of the rise of deglobalisation everywhere, which is clearly the marginalisation of developed economy working classes. But as Twitterness spreads it is becoming nigh on impossible to conceptualise public policy solutions that occupy the centre ground at all. Twitterness works best at the extremes and, in the case of Donald Trump, has even violently yoked the poles into an ideology that indelicately panders to working class prejudices while offering solutions that will only entrench their actual problems.

What it all means for the world one can only wonder at in very short and obnoxious sentences. But I will note in finishing that this kind of atavistic discourse – medium and message working as a pre-recorded grunt on endless repeat, is not the stuff of enlightenment systems.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.