Mediacology

“You have propaganda eyes” by Antonio Lopez
What follows are some thoughts in response to my propaganda piece that ran here and at Reality Sandwich.

The problem is that sometimes, like most bloggers, I shoot from the lip and was writing in a bit of the writer’s equivalent of road rage. I wish I had the time and space to deconstruct the psychological mindset of propagandists. Jacques Ellul did the most comprehensive analysis (“Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”) and the grandfather of advertising, Edward Bernays, lays out a good blueprint (“Propaganda”). The problem is that they write about media in a one-to-many broadcast environment in the context of WWII. Admittedly I’m not an expert on Nazi history, but as a student of media I think one thing that distinguishes the current moment from that period was the power of film as a novel form of communication. I’m fairly certain that the average person now is more media savvy than someone from the era of Nazi Germany, but I have no way to prove that. Of course it depends on who you talk to. As a recent Pew study showed, those who watch the Daily Show are better informed than those who watch Fox. Is it the shows themselves, or the kind of person attracted to those programs?

One of the points I was going for was that that a problem for propagandists who disregard truth is that they end up believing their own lies, which leads to a feedback loop that is ultimately self-destructive. Disinformation always is at least 25% true, we just don’t know which part. But to play the “game,” as the KGB called the power plays around the world, one must certainly hold the quest for control and power far above morals and truth. The problem with these guys, as Seymour Hersh once said in an interview, is that they actually believe what they say. With Kissenger, he said, at least you knew there was an angle on every deal.

Some feel that people who cannot read are susceptible to propaganda, yet the Nazi-era Germans were highly literate and educated. Is this reconcilable? In other words, in the case of Germans, education didn’t matter. What they didn’t have is the ability to critically engage film and other kinds of mass media. I think this is why many of us believe *media* education is so important. What makes contemporary society different is that we have more antibodies in our media consumption habits; we are more immune to their effects because we have simply been exposed to so much. I believe advertisers are well aware of this as evidenced by their increased volume and sensory output. Yes, current media are incredible intense and manipulative, far beyond early film, still I think that they keep ratchetting up as a result of our own desensitization. From what I read in the marketing trade papers, advertisers are freaking out because they believe they are losing relevance. Though youth are more mediated, the kind of media they are consuming is a lot more interactive. The Nazi era and roughly the last 100 years of our media habits have been conditioned by the one-to-many model of information distribution. The exciting thing about our moment is the change into a many-to-many model. Of course the large corporations want as much of that pie as possible. Will they succeed? I don’t know the answer.

Seems like every time we peel a layer from the onion, we find something stinkier inside. For example, I was looking at a new Air Force recruitment Website and it is apparent that the mentality behind all their slick new media is still pretty old: as long as you can identify something visually and can destroy it, you will successfully control the world. This is a consequence of what I call GridThink, which is a left-brained kind of rationality that reduces everything to things in a grid. Reality from this vantage results in the situation we are in now (I wrote more extensively about this in my book, Mediacology, out this month).

I believe the top-down media model is dead, and not worth the amount of energy media activists put into criticizing it. Based on my reading of media and emergence theory, I believe that face-to-face contact remains the most powerful kind of communication, and it is the reality of sidewalks, trade and public space that shape language and civilizations. For example, after the last presidential election I looked at a county-by-county colored-coded map of who voted Republican or Democrat (the so-called blue and red voters). I saw a very clear pattern: people who vote Democrat tend to live on water—rivers, lakes or the sea. Since these are usually places of trade, movement and immigration, my guess is that a Democrat-oriented voter tends to be exposed to different cultures and ideas. Not surprisingly, red states are in the interior, which have less contact with the outside world, and generally see things through mediation devices like television. This supports my idea that media very much behave like ecosystems, and different niches require different strategies. For years I went to these “fly-over” states and did media literacy workshops around the issue of tobacco and alcohol awareness campaigns. Occasionally someone would make an important connection, as once happened at a youth conference in Phoenix: “If you are saying all ads are manipulative, is that true for military ads too?” Bingo! So I think context is the key. On the one hand there needs to be counter arguments and other media sources to balance the information presented on MSM, on the other there needs to be more human discussion and context outside of media.

Unfortunately, both the Republicans and Democrats depend on a 10% margin of those “undecided” who tend to live in gated communities and suburbs. It depresses me that our electoral system has come to who can fight and win theses electoral “crumbs.” This is why you see Hillary pulling out the Rove playbook as she tries to Swift Boat Obama on her way to the Democratic ticket. Fear will decide this next election, I have no doubt about that.

Anyhow, moving on. I do feel that the multitudes and “here comes everybody” flash mobs are the future. We cannot succeed by fighting GridThink on its own terms, we have to fight it with Aikido. Confuse and conquer! A nonlinear, emergent, distributed intelligence is at the basis of nature and system-thinking; it is a holographic manifestation of universal laws. Our ability to think like that gives us a great advantage. The GridThinkers won’t see it coming, and are ill prepared to deal with that emergent paradigm. I’m still trying to solve the pedagogical problem of how that is taught. But I’m sure that in many ways it is emerging regardless.