Democalypse 2016 — It’s (Still) The Internet, Stupid
“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
“We are still in the early stages of a long-term reconfiguration of human society that is the primary influence of the Internet, a continuation of the democratization and globalization of Medieval hierarchies that began with Gutenberg.”
For a guy who had an awful lot to say about past election cycles, I’ve been pretty quiet about this one — except of course for the endless stream of snark and sarcasm I’ve been splattering all over my Facebook page for the past several months.
One reason I have not written in any length or depth about the 2016 campaign is that it’s hard to imagine having anything original to say when the sheer volume of commentary that is unleashed every day probably exceeds the quantity of verbiage that was produced during any entire election year before this one.
But that is precisely what I’ve been keeping a eye on.
Now that we have survived an actual primary in New Hampshire, and some of the most widely dissected ‘trends’ emerging from the primordial ooze of unprecedented electoral chaos have been validated or dismissed by actual voting, it’s time to articulate what I have quietly surmised is the unrecognized trend simmering under all the upheaval all along: It’s the Internet, Stupid.
I’m using “the Internet” here as a proxy for the full array of digital gizmos and services that have appeared at our fingertips over the past 20 years. Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies have integrated themselves into virtually every aspect of our lives. From handheld smartphones to connected televisions with Netflix, from cars with bluetooth and WiFi, to refrigerators that tell you when you’re running out of milk — what all these devices and services have in common is their connectedness. They have all have been designed and manufactured to provide us with what amounts to near continuous contact with a vast global network of info-on-demand. We’re pretty much “on the Internet” all the time now.
And if you don’t think that’s rewiring our brains, you’re just not paying attention.
We think that we have readily adapted to all this new technology, that we are entirely comfortable with it. But I submit for your approval this hypothesis: The Internet has become so pervasive that even people who do not use it all day are affected by it in ways they cannot fully appreciate or comprehend.
In midst of this media flux, we are now engaged in the most digitally-mediated election cycle ever. I think that explains what’s happening as well as anything that’s coming out of the candidates mouths or the mainstream media’s attempts to explain it to us.
As the campaign unfolds and the perplexing candidacies of characters like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders capture the national imagination, our mainstream (i.e. analog/legacy) media sources offer us the sort of conventional wisdom that NBC’s Chuck Todd expressed with the headline “Trump, Sanders N.H. Primary Wins Indicate Voters Are Fed Up.”
My observation is that voters are not just ‘fed up’ in the way that Chuck Todd perceives. More than just ‘fed up’ — they are actually psychologically (if not physically) dislocated in ways that the legacy media establishment can never explain, because they are in the middle of that same dislocation.
We’re not just ‘fed up,’ we are ‘out of sorts’ — because the media environment we were once comfortable with has been… what’s the word the techies like to use? Oh yeah: “disrupted.”
“Disruption” is the buzz word that rationalizes all technological progress. But when you contemplate the dominance of a personality like Donald Trump, what you are actually seeing is the downside of all that disruption (unless you are a Trump devotee, in which case it’s just another upside).
Though most of his seminal work was published in the 1960s and he died in 1980 — a full decade before anybody had ever heard the word “Internet” — Marshall McLuhan understood better than most what the world is experiencing here in the 21st century — that media and technology are more than just the gizmos that we carry around or the networks that we tune in to. He tried to explain that our media form a mostly unseen technological environment.
In his seminal multi-media work The Medium Is The Massage McLuhan writes:
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they the leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered… Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments…. Media, by altering the environment [alter the] ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act. When these ratios change… men change.
If that’s opaque, try this analogy: We are fish, and what McLuhan describes as our media environment is the water that we swim in. A fish doesn’t know how much it relies on water until it is suddenly yanked out of it. And that is precisely the predicament in which the American electorate finds itself in 2016. We are a nation of digital fish, flopping around, unable to breathe without the familiar medium of water.
It’s like the old Bob Dylan song, “You know something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” Well, one thing that is happening is that the media environment has changed; That in turn is inducing changes in the social fabric on an order of magnitude not seen since Gutenberg — when print begat the Reformation, which begat the Enlightenment, which eventually sent the King of England packing from the New World.
This disruption of our information cocoon is certainly not the only factor driving the current high levels of stupid and crazy, but it could be the one factor that brings all of the others to the surface.
When a fatuous bloviator like Donald Trump boasts that he can “Make America Great Again” what he’s really latched onto is a festering desire among a dislocated electorate to be returned to a more familiar, pre-disrupted state. He is telling the fish that he can lead them back to the water. He will not tell them that the lake has evaporated because not even he realizes that the water is gone (besides, he’s having too much fun swimming around in the mud).
Here are some of the specific ways that this new media environment shows up in the current election cycle:
- Bernie Sanders: There have been populist insurgencies in the past, but there’s just no way that an outlier like Bernie Sanders’ gets any traction without the Internet. The broadcast media mostly ignored Sanders until his numbers started rising enough to pose an actual threat to the ‘inevitable’ nomination of Hillary Clinton. That rise was fueled first by chatter on the web, which resulted in contributions delivered over the web, which fostered more online discussion, until Sanders was finally recognized as a force to be reckoned with. The day after he won the New Hampshire primary he raised almost $7-million — all of it in individual contributions over the web. And with Bernie comes…
- The (apparent) Rise of “Democratic Socialism” — Regardless of the outcome of the Sanders campaign, the extent to which a political anathema has gained favor is certainly noteworthy. Others have done a much better job of explaining the underlying economic realities than I can. But it should come as no surprise that Sanders’ platform appeals to voters under 30 — not because of the promise of “free stuff,” but because those voters are “digital natives” whose lifetime of connectedness lends naturally to a spirit of “we’re all in this together” (rather than the antiquated, conservative ethos of “every man for himself”). It’s not hard to imagine Capitalism -v- Socialism as the Catholic -v- Protestant Reformation-type struggle of the 21st century.
- The Demise of the Punditocracy: One of the most disruptive features of the new media landscape is the “parity between points of origin and points of reception.” In the broadcast era, in any given city there were just a handful of points of origin — the broadcast towers — and a near infinite number of receivers in the field. With the advent of the Internet, every point of reception is also a point of origin. Now everybody has an opinion, and ‘broadcasting’ has been replaced by ‘sharing.’ Once-recognized voices of authority are now just another voice in the crowd. The electorate now gets its input from Internet chat rooms, and political rallies sound like Internet comment threads.
- Because… Facebook: I hesitate to admit this publicly, but the sad fact is that my Facebook “news” feed is far more entertaining and informative than the New York Times. I grew up with the Times, and the Times is still my go-to mainstream news app. But I can’t open the Times without recalling the segment when The Daily Show’s Jason Jones visited the Times newsroom and challenged the editor, to “name one thing in [the paper] that happened today…” These days it seems that Facebook and Twitter are the actual news sources, even when some of that news comes from sources like the Times. A source like the Times speaks with a single voice, but a source like Facebook speaks with an infinite variety of voices.
- Old Media In Service To The New: Another once-prominent news source that has struggled to stay relevant (and solvent) is the New York Daily News, which in the past few months has entertained its readers with brilliant front page illustrations lampooning some of the presidential candidates. Several of these front pages have “gone viral.” But this new found cultural relevancy comes with a healthy dose of Internet-induced irony: As Daily News editor Jim Rich said, “It’s surreal to think that 99 percent of the millions of people who will look at our Page 1 on a given day will actually never hold the paper in their hands” (further irony alert: that observation was reported in the New York Times).
- Old Media In Service To The New #2: One of the most insipid “innovations” in this whole cycle has been the inclusion of questions from Internet sources like Facebook and YouTube at several of the debates. As Nashville based cyber-pundit Bruce Barry said after the February 12 post-New Hampshire debate in Wisconsin, “I figured that since this is the PBS-hosted debate we’d be liberated from trendy nonsense like social media types asking vapid questions. No such luck …. Whatever happened to stodgy old PBS? I’m not sure I can keep giving annual donations to an outfit that asks Facebook questions.” That sounds like a subscriber who’s commitment to PBS is in serious danger of some… disruption.
A network-TV podium emblazoned with a #hashtag
- It’s All About The Clicks: In the broadcast and print environments, there was something almost civilized about the presence of advertising. On television, the announcer would always politely “pause for a word from our sponsor.” In the digital era that civility has been displaced by clickbait and 15- or 30-second commercial pre-rolls. As Ezra Klein said when recently sounding the alarm about Donald Trump after his victory in New Hampshire, “The media, which has grown used to covering Trump as a sideshow, delighted in the moment along with him — it was funny, and it meant clicks, takes, traffic.” That explains Trump as well as Chuck Todd saying that America is “fed up.”
- Is That A Camera In Your Pocket? The proliferation of smart phones has enabled the widespread distribution of amateur video of institutional atrocities committed against underprivileged minority communities. Such footage has breathed life into movements like “Black Lives Matter.” But all of these episodes are entirely a consequence of the networked media environment and the gizmos that are connected to it. Those recordings show up on the Internet before they ever make it to network TeeVee.
Those are just a few examples of how the media environment we are living in now is different from anything that preceded it. As McLuhan said “when the ratios change, men change.”
Changes of the magnitude the planet is now experiencing do not come easily. We are playing with a whole new generation of toys and Donald Trump is the hover board exploding into flames in the basement.
The experience of the past century teaches us that the leaders who best adapt to new media are the ones who who find themselves at the apex of history. Radio elected Franklin Roosevelt (four times!). Television elected John F. Kennedy.
Now we get to see who the Internet will elect.
Originally published at cohesionarts.com on February 12, 2016.
Paul Schatzkin is the author of The Boy Who Invented Television: A Story of Persistence and Quiet Passion (a biography of Philo T. Farnsworth)
#TMITM (The Medium Is The Message)
