On the challenge of choosing the President in an era of visual media
Marshall McLuhan famously noted that whoever discovered water it certainly wasn’t a fish. That’s us if you didn’t notice, swimming in a sea of visual media. We simply can’t perceive how it affects us.
If you would, imagine an American presidential election before television, or before radio. When you step back for a moment, it becomes clear that almost everything we’re experiencing in this election is directly affected by the progress in media technology that accelerated through the 20th century and until today.
What must the President do, and how shall we decide?
The task at hand in any democratic election is to choose a person to fill a particular hierarchical function. As chief executive, certain issues and circumstances rise to the level of a presidential decision. Predicting how a candidate is likely to handle these decisions once in office in addition to the likely cumulative outcome of those decisions is the true essence of a voter’s consideration. The primary qualities of a candidate are those that most directly inform these decisions.
But the roiling sea of visual media that surrounds us now distorts our perception and places emphasis on a different set of personal qualities. Of course, not all of these are negative. A political leader must harness the communication methods of the era, for example, just to get started. But the intensity of modern visual media seizes the attention of the human mind. Politics moves onto the same brightly colored screens as movies. Candidates begin to be judged by the same qualities as TV shows: appearance, emotion, and other secondary qualities.
Not that these things are unimportant. It’s just that the natural power of visual media — the direct connection to the visual cortex that allowed visual media to crowd out previous forms — inverts the obvious power of these qualities. The impact of these effects should not be underestimated.
No one voter can decide who should be the next President of the United States. There is too much information. None of us has the full picture. The best decision requires the “wisdom of the crowds,” routed through democracy. In an era of visual media, all of us—voters, journalists, politicians—should try to compensate for the incredible distorting power built into these communication tools. We have to be aware of it. We need to develop mental techniques that allow us to peer through the distorting effects of our media, gather information, then reprioritize so it applies directly to the decision at hand: Which candidate would best do the work demanded of the President of the United States?
We look into an incredibly complex future that is coming at us very fast. Our success is not assured. Even our survival is not assured. We must decide well.
