In the middle of India’s anti-corruption agitation fuelled by ‘civil society’, one is reminded of the theory of information-blitzing and opinion-building that underwrites the practice. Much of politics, apart from media, marketing, advertising and public relations, runs on these very tracks. I have to invoke Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian professor, who made a considerable impact when he published The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects in 1967. This book was about the effect of different media on the human sensorium. Media, such as TV with its visual content in addition to audio, radio, music on vinyl, even “noise”, were not only “hot” and “cool” on the senses, said Prof McLuhan, but were “extensions” of human personalities, their emotions and thoughts.
Prof McLuhan not only anticipated the ability of the various mediums of communication to witness, record, influence, but actually chronicle the inevitability of change. Through the 1970s, hip media types toted Prof McLuhan’s books around because it was loaded with futuristic phrases such as “global village” and “surfing”, meaning the very same as what we do today with keyboard and mouse, and not what beach boys do at Malibu or Bondi Beach. Prof McLuhan, who died in 1980, also visualised the “world-wide-web”, still called “www” in his very own phrasing, even though the Internet was not even fashionable till the 1990s.
Prof McLuhan anticipated the freedom of information and action the Web would bestow on the ordinary member of the public. Still, he didn’t foresee the ubiquitous cellphone in every pocket, and the apexing and convergence of various abilities on this platform of great portability. In the relatively simple 1960s and 1970s, technologically if not culturally speaking, people were exploring sexual freedom with the advent of the contraceptive pill — minus the scourge of HIV and AIDS. They were also much troubled by the Vietnam War in a time when Left-liberalism, even socialism, in certain quarters was thought to be fashionable.
In this setting, Prof McLuhan’s message seemed both avant garde and psychedelic, rather than dazzlingly prescient. But then, given the mindset of the times, a lot of pronouncements did, such as Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary’s exhortation to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. This was not, we are now told, a call to use drugs, particularly LSD, and do nothing, as was popularly supposed; but a fairly cerebral call to look within. But then, till recently, we were still in the era of managing perception to reflect the reality we wanted to project.
Hence, in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks, Prof Leary explained, though some would accuse the LSD-using professor of revisionism, that “Turn on meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive... Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you... Drop out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.” This high-minded apologia could almost be a prescription for the awakened ‘civil society’ of today, not willing to stomach corruption meekly anymore, instead of a seemingly misinterpreted hippie battle cry from the Seventies.
Prof Leary even reworked his famous slogan for the personal computer era in the decade before he died in 1996. He now said, “Turn on, Boot up, Jack in” — and presumably contribute to the cyberdelic counter-culture that cannot be controlled by the state. If indeed Prof Leary was suggesting a cultural revolution via the Internet, isn’t it a little of what is happening in Indian ‘civil society’, albeit vanguarded by conventional media? Murmurs about the Emergency have not surfaced without possibility.
But it isn’t just the freedom of the Internet and its denizens on Facebook and Twitter and the blogosphere in general that is the McLuhan-style ‘massage’ here. In 2011, we have to accept that the nature of the domestic and global political discourse itself has changed irrevocably. Traditional politics from the days of Julius Caesar involved the management of perception. John F Kennedy won his sliver-thin presidential battle with Richard Nixon by suggesting the latter looked like an untrustworthy used car salesman, exploiting the latter’s intense five o’ clock shadow in his promotional advertisements. Also, the photogenic JFK handled the first televised presidential debate much better than the ill-at-ease Nixon. But then, Nixon did manage to repackage himself expertly, as described in The Selling of the President by Joe McGinniss in 1968, for his next — and successful — bid for White House.
But with the McLuhan Age no longer in the future, a new transparency, not intentional, not even voluntary, has come to stay and will determine things going forward. It is not just the brilliant simplicity of a virtual dropbox in cyberspace that is at the heart of the WikiLeaks phenomenon. It is the true, if inconvenient, meaning of transparency, without the fear of consequences for the anonymous ‘snitch’. Or even the aggressive brand of ambush journalism practised by some. It is the empowering technology being carried around in every pocket today on a cellphone — ubiquitous, but potent as a loaded gun.
And then there is streaming technology, used extensively and thus constantly improved by the purveyors of free pornography on the Internet. It not only entertains millions but also enables the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, the CIA director and the military top brass of the US, sitting in Washington, DC, to watch the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s den in distant Abbottabad in real time.
Any place can be infiltrated, anything can be streamed and/or recorded with spy cameras, on cellphones, or be conveyed, via MMS/SMS message or e-mail, almost simultaneously, with reasonable anonymity. It gives a new meaning to the notion of ‘live’ reporting because this kind does not need the services of a professional journalist, except perhaps to contextualise and distribute the information. No Cabinet meeting, notwithstanding the Ministers’ vow of secrecy, is safe anymore. Besides, 24x7 news channels have ample time and space to give blanket coverage to opposing points of view, and newspapers specialise in merciless analyses.
Most importantly though, it is no longer a contest of political leanings packaged for the masses like it was. Now the masses can — and do — receive unvarnished news. It is the political discourse that must adapt and mutate to suit the times. Prof McLuhan loved to cry that people knew nothing about his work. Well, perhaps now we do, when we recognise its effects all around us.
Source: The Pioneer
Prof McLuhan not only anticipated the ability of the various mediums of communication to witness, record, influence, but actually chronicle the inevitability of change. Through the 1970s, hip media types toted Prof McLuhan’s books around because it was loaded with futuristic phrases such as “global village” and “surfing”, meaning the very same as what we do today with keyboard and mouse, and not what beach boys do at Malibu or Bondi Beach. Prof McLuhan, who died in 1980, also visualised the “world-wide-web”, still called “www” in his very own phrasing, even though the Internet was not even fashionable till the 1990s.
Prof McLuhan anticipated the freedom of information and action the Web would bestow on the ordinary member of the public. Still, he didn’t foresee the ubiquitous cellphone in every pocket, and the apexing and convergence of various abilities on this platform of great portability. In the relatively simple 1960s and 1970s, technologically if not culturally speaking, people were exploring sexual freedom with the advent of the contraceptive pill — minus the scourge of HIV and AIDS. They were also much troubled by the Vietnam War in a time when Left-liberalism, even socialism, in certain quarters was thought to be fashionable.
In this setting, Prof McLuhan’s message seemed both avant garde and psychedelic, rather than dazzlingly prescient. But then, given the mindset of the times, a lot of pronouncements did, such as Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary’s exhortation to “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. This was not, we are now told, a call to use drugs, particularly LSD, and do nothing, as was popularly supposed; but a fairly cerebral call to look within. But then, till recently, we were still in the era of managing perception to reflect the reality we wanted to project.
Hence, in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks, Prof Leary explained, though some would accuse the LSD-using professor of revisionism, that “Turn on meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive... Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you... Drop out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change.” This high-minded apologia could almost be a prescription for the awakened ‘civil society’ of today, not willing to stomach corruption meekly anymore, instead of a seemingly misinterpreted hippie battle cry from the Seventies.
Prof Leary even reworked his famous slogan for the personal computer era in the decade before he died in 1996. He now said, “Turn on, Boot up, Jack in” — and presumably contribute to the cyberdelic counter-culture that cannot be controlled by the state. If indeed Prof Leary was suggesting a cultural revolution via the Internet, isn’t it a little of what is happening in Indian ‘civil society’, albeit vanguarded by conventional media? Murmurs about the Emergency have not surfaced without possibility.
But it isn’t just the freedom of the Internet and its denizens on Facebook and Twitter and the blogosphere in general that is the McLuhan-style ‘massage’ here. In 2011, we have to accept that the nature of the domestic and global political discourse itself has changed irrevocably. Traditional politics from the days of Julius Caesar involved the management of perception. John F Kennedy won his sliver-thin presidential battle with Richard Nixon by suggesting the latter looked like an untrustworthy used car salesman, exploiting the latter’s intense five o’ clock shadow in his promotional advertisements. Also, the photogenic JFK handled the first televised presidential debate much better than the ill-at-ease Nixon. But then, Nixon did manage to repackage himself expertly, as described in The Selling of the President by Joe McGinniss in 1968, for his next — and successful — bid for White House.
But with the McLuhan Age no longer in the future, a new transparency, not intentional, not even voluntary, has come to stay and will determine things going forward. It is not just the brilliant simplicity of a virtual dropbox in cyberspace that is at the heart of the WikiLeaks phenomenon. It is the true, if inconvenient, meaning of transparency, without the fear of consequences for the anonymous ‘snitch’. Or even the aggressive brand of ambush journalism practised by some. It is the empowering technology being carried around in every pocket today on a cellphone — ubiquitous, but potent as a loaded gun.
And then there is streaming technology, used extensively and thus constantly improved by the purveyors of free pornography on the Internet. It not only entertains millions but also enables the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, the CIA director and the military top brass of the US, sitting in Washington, DC, to watch the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s den in distant Abbottabad in real time.
Any place can be infiltrated, anything can be streamed and/or recorded with spy cameras, on cellphones, or be conveyed, via MMS/SMS message or e-mail, almost simultaneously, with reasonable anonymity. It gives a new meaning to the notion of ‘live’ reporting because this kind does not need the services of a professional journalist, except perhaps to contextualise and distribute the information. No Cabinet meeting, notwithstanding the Ministers’ vow of secrecy, is safe anymore. Besides, 24x7 news channels have ample time and space to give blanket coverage to opposing points of view, and newspapers specialise in merciless analyses.
Most importantly though, it is no longer a contest of political leanings packaged for the masses like it was. Now the masses can — and do — receive unvarnished news. It is the political discourse that must adapt and mutate to suit the times. Prof McLuhan loved to cry that people knew nothing about his work. Well, perhaps now we do, when we recognise its effects all around us.
Source: The Pioneer
