McLuhan, the peek-a-boo-culture, and the modern conditions for propaganda

On propaganda, pt. 1

(image by Aaron Wood)

To really understand propaganda in modern mass society, and especially in its contemporary digital era, one has to have a firm grasp of the basic conditions of communication that characterizes our environment. Of the modes and habits of thought that come into play when we form opinions and generally make conscious affirmations about what’s real and not.

This might seem an odd point of focus. Don’t humans basically think in the same manner, always and everywhere? We observe reality and infer conclusions from the facts, relations and patterns that we see.

This is of course true in the most general sense. But things aren’t quite so simple in practice. Our everyday experience clearly shows that there can be significant variations in how we access, filter and parse information.

I don’t much care for soccer, for instance. I don’t really get the subtleties of what I’m seeing on the field when a game is shown on TV, because I’ve never taken the time to learn the details. I understand what a goal is, and I grasp what the kick-off is about, but that’s basically it. On the other hand, somebody with a decent interest in the sport who has seen a lot of games and played a bit themselves, will immediately and without effort pick up on things that go right past me. Things like how the red team seems to strategize around a penalty, or whether or not that forward should have gone for the shot. Maybe I could deduce a bit given 15 minutes and some slow-motion footage, but I haven’t been trained to spot these things and will be hard pressed to observe them during an actual game.

The very same thing holds true for all communication whatsoever, and this was a core premise of Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the societal effects of different types of media in terms of how they influence “cognitive organization” (McLuhan, 1962).

This general topic encompasses a truly vast field of research, so we are only going to be able to scratch the surface a little bit here, but a few interesting observations of relevance to our situation today can still be made.

One of McLuhan’s key insights (which was indebted to Lewis Mumford, something especially evident in relation to the latter’s work Technics and Civilization), was that the structure of media influences how information is received and interpreted in a society. Different types of media are not only more or less amicable to certain types of content (which in itself is important) they in a related sense also make an impression upon how people reflect and communicate. By shaping our habits of thought, they influence how we infer conclusions, what types of associations we tend to focus on, and what the realm of possible or likely interpretations of the received information looks like. It relates to the issue of how everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer, and can be illustrated by something like a culture where the only practiced kind of music is on the ancient pentatonic scale. New compositions will then overwhelmingly tend towards this form, and pieces which are compatible with this mode will be preferred over the potentially infinite set of pieces which are not. In other words, the content or information that is (musically) communicated in this culture will tend to be of a kind determined by the form of the medium.

But what’s more, a people trained in such a media environment will find it very difficult to even understand content that isn’t obviously compatible with the form they’re used to. Compositions that can’t be expressed with the pentatonic scale will sound a bit off, because you will now have to approach music as such in a somewhat different way than you’re used to, to actually experience the harmonies as... Harmonious. The same thing goes for differences between styles of painting. Someone who’s only ever seen realist art will possibly have to make an effort to understand the moods an impressionist like Monet was attempting to convey. Indeed, she may even fail to do so because of the artwork’s glaring flaws relative to the purposes and criteria of realism, or because she hasn’t been trained from the ground up to experience in art the subtle moods that impressionism tries to capture – so that the attempt at communication goes unnoticed through no fault of her own.

Monet, Weeping Willow, 1918

It’s like how Russian children can more easily see certain nuances of color that children in the U.S. generally won’t be able to, because the Russian language has concepts for these nuances that emphasize them in our perception, which over time trains a person to more readily pick them out.

Neil Postman, American educator and social philosopher, made very profitable use of McLuhan’s observation to emphasize this particular conflict in terms of printed media vs. the type of visual culture brought about by television (Postman, 1985). His basic point was that a culture trained almost exclusively by the television medium, will have quite a hard time identifying and understanding the often complex and multi-layered argumentation of refined written exposition. We’re not going to delve into the empirical support for this hypothesis (Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation is a good place to start, however), but I trust that the preceding remarks have at least rendered it plausible. So the situation Postman describes implies an immediate vulnerability in the affected population with regard to its ability to effectively and correctly evaluating multi-faceted and ambiguous data. In other words, they’ll not be used to make complex abstract inferences, which written exposition (or a vibrant culture of oral tradition) will train you to do, whereas the passive interaction that characterizes the TV medium and associated forms of communication will train the participant in entirely different ways.

And why is that a problem? Well, a population that on average is ill-suited to handle complex abstractions is not going to be able to creatively organize. It will be easy to govern to the extent that it lacks the ability to scrutinize the precepts and decrees of its rulers, and to understand the social and political processes enveloping it.

It will be easy to propagandize.

Now propaganda is a very broad subject as well, and we’ll develop a more detailed picture of this phenomenon as we move on, but let us just assume a general definition of the concept. Jacques Ellul, French philosopher and sociologist, approaches propaganda with the thumbnail definition that it is the set of techniques, peculiar to modern mass society, of psychological and social influence combined with techniques of organization which in some way has the purpose of shaping human behaviour. A population which lacks the appropriate critical tools will be less apt to protect itself from this sort of influence – it will have a hard time spotting it, and it will be less able to cook up any countermeasures.  

Note, however, that this isn’t some elitist dismissal of the ”uneducated” classes. The contemporary intellectual class is generally more susceptible to propaganda in comparison to the proletariat, and while the reasons for this are complex, this fact is not in spite of the intellectuals’ excellent grasp of the subtleties of rational exposition. The educated are for the most part not well-rounded generalists trained in incisive critical analysis of complex phenomena. They’re more often narrow specialists, enmeshed in consumer culture just like everyone else, and with stakes in the game due to their relative status and privilege. In other words, the educated generally identify with the system, its narratives and priorities. When it comes to competence, members of my class at best ”know stuff”, i.e. we have amassed a good bit of factual information, but even that’s increasingly rare. An acquaintance of mine who at the time was a journalist at one of our most esteemed institutions remarked that the accumulation of factual knowledge was increasingly becoming obsolete (since everything is so easily accessible via the Internet), and that what higher education really ought to give us was an ”attitude” towards information. A sort of heuristic tool to help us sort information we encounter.

Both of these things are useful, but not without the capacity to critically evaluate both information and any sorting mechanisms you encounter or generally make use of. A critical ”attitude” is of little value if you can’t actually evaluate that which you encounter, and may well paradoxically make you more susceptible to propaganda since you pride youself on this ”healthy skepticism” which in reality is little more than a brand preference for a certain market segment of propaganda or rhetoric. You only read prestigious periodicals that carry the trappings and symbols of authority. Therefore, you “know stuff”, unlike the ignorant rabble.

But apart from this disgression - key to Postman’s argument was an aspect of modern mass media culture he termed “the peek-a-boo-world”, a phenomenon of increasingly decontextualized information, the development of which he traced back to the establishment of telegraphic communications. Here he saw the inception of a mass marketing of information whose value increasingly pertained to novelty and sensation irrespective of its function, meaning and coherence. As industrial society expanded, and we were saturated by the noise of marketing and entertainment, Postman argues that information in the mass media marketplace was increasingly decontextualized, meaning it was decoupled from people’s lived realities, needs and priorities - yet also from other information, from premises and conclusions. And this final clause is immensely important.

A culture that predominantly approaches information as decontextualized and unrelated to a complex context of meaning will be prone to take everything at face value. It will be led about by headlines, by memes and pre-digested tweets without being able to connect the dots and see the bigger picture.

As soon as the party says so, it will know that we have always been at war with Eurasia.

Still from David Lynch’s Rabbits, 2002

References

Bauerlein, Mark, The Dumbest Generation, 2008

McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962

Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization, 1934

Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985