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Thoughts On Media
Jean Baudrillard, America (trans. by Chris Turner) "What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected -- far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us -- and this itself is a superstition. "Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other -- fatal -- moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen."
Murray Edelman, Constructing The Political Spectacle "...some events, such as elections, are defined as news worth reporting regardless of whether they bring significant consequences for anyone. By contrast, a technical action by a central bank or defense ministry that can mean prosperity or disaster, life or death, for thousands of people may not even be mentioned in most newspapers or broadcasts. Nor is there any assurance that the long-term effects of public policies will ever be reported as news, though they are the crucial test of the effectiveness of policies. They typically cannot be known until long after the policy has been established, and they are often complex and not easily reported in journalistic language. Political news accordingly highlights conflicts in elections, legislative bodies, administrative agencies, courts, and elsewhere while paying little or no attention to whether the victories and defeats in these arenas have made a difference in people's lives and, if so, what kind of difference. This tendency is strengthened, and perhaps generated, by the fascination of both liberals and conservatives with political processes and their distaste for examining outcomes that highlight inequities and inequalities in the results of the processes. . . "The commonsensical view of the news is essentially the same as the positivist view. The world of newsworthy events is distinct from the people who report it and learn about it. Reporting should be objective, though the ideal is not always achieved; so political developments are the same for everyone, though some people pay more attention to them than others, and some misinterpret them. "If the meaning of the news lay only in the 'objective' physical movements of people, currency, bombs, welfare checks, and so on, this model of the physical world would make some sense. But the premise is plainly absurd. It is only the meanings people attribute to observations, not sense perceptions or discernible physical movements in themselves, that make them important or irrelevant. And the significance of a troop invasion, a cut in the discount rate or in tax rates, or an electoral ballot count is always ambiguous and usually controversial. It is the ambiguity and the controversy that make developments political in character. So there can be no world of events distinct from the interpretations of observers."
Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy "Freedom of speech has become a central concern of the Western society because of the discovery among the Greeks that dialectic, as demonstrated in the Socratic dialogues, is a principal method of attaining truth, and particularly a method of attaining moral and political truth. 'The ability to raise searching difficulties on both sides of a subject will,' said Aristotle, 'make us detect more easily the truth and error about the several points that arise.' The right to speak freely is one of the necessary means to the attainment of truth. That, and not the subjective pleasure of utterance, is why freedom is a necessity in the good society. . . "Divorced from its original purpose and justification, as a process of criticism, freedom to think and speak are not self-evident necessities. It is only from the hope and the intention of discovering the truth that freedom acquires such high public significance. The right of self-expression is, as such, a private amenity rather than a public necessity. The right to utter words, whether or not they have meaning, and regardless of their truth, could not be a vital interest of a great state but for the presumption that they are the chaff which goes with the utterance of true and significant words. "But when the chaff of silliness, baseness, and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity, or such mischief, that it cannot be preserved against the demand for a restoration of order or of decency. If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and to incite the passions, of the people. Then freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it. "What has been lost in the tumult is the meaning of the obligation which is involved in the right to speak freely. It is the obligation to subject the utterance to criticism and debate. Because the dialectical debate is a procedure for attaining moral and political truth, the right to speak is protected by a willingness to debate... "There is no more right to deceive than there is a right to swindle, to cheat, or to pick pockets. . .when genuine debate is lacking, freedom of speech does not work as it is meant to work. It has lost the principle which regulates it and justifies it -- that is to say, dialectic conducted according to logic and the rules of evidence. If there is no effective debate, the unrestricted right to speak will unloose so many propagandists, procurers, and panderers upon the public that sooner or later in self-defense the people will turn to the censors to protect them."
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the 'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as 'content'. The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The 'content' of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech . . . "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception."
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