This post is not about Twitter, the role of social media, mass media, in the election of Donald Trump.
It is rather – hopefully – a deeper comment about the role that technology plays in our society. Simply put: I believe that our obsession with certain technologies has irretrievably harmed our societies’ ability to act in a civilized manner.
Many of us have our “go to” book or text as a source of comfort in times like this and I am no exception. During the summer and our three-week long train and boat trip – our own “adieu” to the USA after seven years – I re-read what I still consider a masterpiece of social commentary, Neil Postman’s “Technopoly”. Although written in pre-Internet times it is a powerful, readable and often amusing critique of the dangers of – to put no finer point on it – technology worship.
A central thesis – if I have to give a potted summary (please go read the damned book – he is far more eloquent than me) – is that human civilization depends on conversation and that the nature of the conversation is shared by the technologies we use.
In ancient, oral cultures wisdom, morals, ethics, and justice were passed down by elders through storytelling and ritual: if all you have is the spoken word, then that technology shapes what is transmitted. Later – from the Old Testament forward – the core tenets of society are captured on tablets of stone: if that is the technology available to you, it will shape how you transmit those conversations (I’m guessing that stone tablets were expensive but oral conversation was still cheap given the vast interpretations over the centuries of a small set of ground rules. I digress…)
The Enlightenment was driven by the spread of the written word: the technology of the printing press made Holy scripts easily available alongside the vernacular and critical texts.
Fast forward to today, a future that even someone as visionary as Postman might have found difficult to fathom, and we can see that today’s conversations – about politics, law, ethics, culture, Brexit or Trump – are in turn shaped by the technologies that convey them: in this case, the 160 character limit of the Tweet.
This may seem pretty obvious when laid out like this but let’s spell it out: if the entirely of your political dialogue is conducted over the limiting media of Twitter and Facebook, then you are not going to say anything very substantial, you need to be curt and attention-grabbing; preferably, spicy or controversial; and build up a mass following of shallow commitment.
The technologies of the Internet have spawned this generation of demagogues – or at least given them the valuable oxygen that would have been denied them in other eras. Just as television changed the nature of what constitutes a “political debate” – reducing lucid and penetrating exchanges to the hard-hitting soundbite.
While not condoning the obscurantism and fetishism of religion, churches and church leaders over the millennia provided a structure and method for capturing, conveying and perpetuating the morals and ethics of a society. That role of religion has not been replaced by anything as strong – instead we idolize the superficial and easy to digest; we enable those who insist “don’t tell me how to behave”; we pretend that anyone can be anything – including US President – and then don’t provide any soft-landings for the disillusioned.
In such circumstances it is no surprise that the 2016 monsters of Brexit and Trump have been born.
It is only a surprise that it has taken so long and that we have so complacently allowed technology – in its widest sense – to dictate so much about how our societies should function.
I will be exploring these themes – around how we govern (or rather fail to govern) the technologies we use and, most importantly, the steps we can take to regain control of human conversation and our most precious values – in a new blog to be launched in the coming weeks.
Brown in the USA 