“Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ in 1958.” Boy oh boy. The front-page sting for Chris Mitchell’s deeply buried media column suggested we were in for something special. Eraserhead did not disappoint. The column is … to call it a ramble is misleading because a ramble will eventually get you somewhere. If you’re going to stick together Quadrant, Shannon Molloy, Morrissey, a play wot he saw, and wandering in the Mulga, a bit of art is required.
But the best bit is at the start, where Mitchell summons up the ghost of Marshall McLuhan:
“Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ in 1958. Much misunderstood, McLuhan was not so much concerned about media technologies in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He was thinking about how media change humans.
“Changes wrought by media on society have peaked with social media, where Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat now divide whole societies, local communities and international politics and media along shrill partisan lines, but with little reflection about substantive issues. Rather, social media capture and instantly reflect the emotional reactions of different communities of interest to different events …”
Then going back to the play wot he saw
“[Character X] does not want to follow [the] facts. She wants to report what is trending on Twitter. This is, I think, McLuhan’s media message for modern journalism.”
“Social media has nothing to do with journalism and less to do with the truth. Journalists must talk to real people and develop real contacts, rather than follow people’s self-focused social media mental doodles and poses. Privilege facts over feelings.”
Much misunderstood is right. McLuhan’s whole point was that the technological form of a medium changes the nature of human perception and cognition. A print culture via the technology of the presses will give you a certain way of being in the world, the instant transmission and real-time duration of the cathode-ray-tube and aerial.
Because human society went through different media ensembles and were thus different types of people, McLuhan argued that there was no one ensemble that was “truer” than another. The media ensemble of the time defines what matters, to whom, and what acquires the status of “fact”. McLuhan was an English studies scholar of deep and broad learning. He regarded the newspaper as a recent invention that changed the way people thought. In his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy he pointed out that the surreal juxtaposition of stories created by the broadsheet newspaper form changed the way that different narratives were linked together, and thus changed the actual character of our thought. As McLuhan pointed out, “news” was an invention of the 17th century.
What is funny about Mitchell’s article is that, in arguing for a separation between “truth” out there and the medium that conveys it, he is getting McLuhan’s core idea — the idea upon which all his work and influence rests — exactly wrong. There is no point in McLuhan’s work from which to judge social media as better or worse with regards to earlier media forms. In a famous debate on TV with Norman Mailer, Mailer noted that he didn’t ever hear the words “good or bad” in McLuhan’s commentary. McLuhan replied, quoting Burke on the American Revolution, that there was no point condemning a whole people, i.e. the sort of judgements Mitchell routinely makes are asinine. You can watch it on YouTube — social media coming to the rescue against shoddy newspaper journalism.
There are two possibilities arising from Eraserhead’s errors. Either he genuinely believes that his version of McLuhan’s ideas are correct, in which case he has got it completely wrong. Or he doesn’t care, and he is just jamming together a famous name with his usual diatribe against social media. In which case he would appear to be disregarding any notion that truth matters, in order to argue for the importance of truth.
Why dissect this at such length? Well first off, it’s fun to watch Mitchell make a fool of himself while trying to present as a thoughtful and well-read man, but it’s also a measure of the dilemma the right finds itself in. They spend so much time pumping out ideology and propaganda that they lose the ability to do any real analysis. Result? You run a national broadsheet with no competition to an eight-figure annual loss. Truthy.
The only way to end this is with the famous scene from Annie Hall: “Oh yeah, well, I happen to have Mr McLuhan right over here …” Chris, do you know what a hostile gesture this is towards you?
Chris who?
I suspect Kim Kardashian has far more followers on Twitter than whoever he is has readers of his column. Which begs the question: what makes one a journalist – is it writing, or being read?
If “social media has nothing to do with journalism and truth” then what does Limited News – where, more often than not, opinion is passed off as news, and certain salient facts are omitted for fear of undermining an assertion of the presenter – to create a certain image?
Using their position and market dominance, trying to influence other’s perceptions of what’s going on.
To write about distortion, lies, hysteria & misrepresentation of deranged and/or minority minority views in a mudorc rag is very courageous.
Maybe boorish info-thugs like Mitchell should leave McLuhan out of it, but every real journalist who is worried about the ‘death’ of their comfortable little info-sinecure should be poring over every word he wrote.
So many solicitations – why-oh-why the punters must save us, because we’re so important to their daily lived epistemology – so little Janet Malcolmian honesty about the fifty year public con-job mass forum ‘journalism’ has enabled. For every Katherine Graham, six Rupert Murdochs; for every vocationally serious exponent, 50 repulsive opportunistic hacks; for every Kate McLymont, two dozen Mitchells, 50 Piers Akermans, Christ, 500 prettily blank-eyed, diligently-droning UTS/Bathurst/Mail Order Comms 101 grads; for each once-in-three-decades Watergate, fifty thousand and daily counting grotesque Schapelle Corby harassment-trivia farces…and delusional preeners like y’colleague over the way Christopher Warren still prattle prissily on about the public’s obligation to go to the barricades to protect journalism’s version of how the world is, as writ by t’stouthearted yeoman tradies and t’honest jobbing scrivs of the Fourth?? It’d be like the AMA claiming the College of Surgeons is worth our blood defending even though 99 out of every 100 operations resulted in death…
Mitchell’s not hard to disdain, but he’s every bit as much a ‘journalist’ as Mark Colvin was. Job lot, see. So the Fourth elders can Twitter their disapproval of the Roger Franklins in their number all they like, and assert (on scant sum-total/percentage evidence) that Journalism’s little McLuhanite information bubble/echo chamber/closeted worldview/ideal of ‘truth’ is worth more than Trump’s, Putin’s?, Murdo-…oh wait, he’s one of Colvin’s Crew too….but until the vocational leaders develop the survival instincts to define what their profession is at last – and so what is not part of it – and the guts to start self-policing it, the only sane response from the public is: fuck off.
Thanks for the excellently apposite side-piece. I am hopelessly obsessed but I think this – post-internet epistemology – is the biggest issue of our time, or at least the first one we need to get sorted. Because every ‘public debate’ from global warming to trrrsmism to political fragmentation itself is increasingly no longer copping the bullshit demand that it extrude itself painfully, obediently and usually unsatisfactorily via the tight, self-important pucker of the mass media’s cankered, syphillitic epistemology. It means that not only are we (who can blame us?) side-stepping odious gate-keeping turds like Mitchell/Murdoch (good); we’re also jettisoning desirable gate-tenders like expertise, perspective, historical context, factual accord, etc etc.
And this abuse of position perpetrated under the flag-of-convenience auspices of a farcical “Professional(????) Code of Conduct” licence to peddle bull-shit news – with a “because we can” attitude.
Klewso, shorely you’re not suggesting that such magnificent vocational tools as the Press Council and Aunty’s eight weekly minutes of Meeja Watchin’ are anything less than fiercesome Rottweilers bravely self-safeguarding the Fourth’s professional probity?!?
Front Page of the Telegraph trial-by-truthin’ & recant for you, heretic…!
To all intents and purposes ‘Qld’ only has one paper.
“Screw news” – the Curry or Maul is blatantly anti-Labor, anti-greens, anti-anyone who gets in Rupert and his party’s way and actively pimps Adani – try finding any negative publicity for it with it’s sheets.
If your got your “validation”, for thinking the way you do, from it, you’d reckon there’s nothing wrong with the mine, nothing can go wrong, or that there’s anything wrong with it’s “management practices” ever recorded, that we should do everything to get it passed, because it’s all upside – and the only one’s opposed to it are just radical, progressive party-poopers. And heaven help any other news outlet that contradicts that Limited News narrative.
But, if history tells us anything, you can bet your virginity on where this rag will be found if anything does go wrong, when it comes to responsibility? Nowhere.