Politics of the Screen
"The new electric galaxy of events has already moved deeply into the Gutenberg galaxy. Even without collision, such coexistence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and tension to every living person. Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant."
"…with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience." – Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964
For those born into it, an established technological system seems elemental, a part of the environment like water or air. A person living in a certain technological environment has little or no association with life before the technology, nor can they much conceive of life without it. Over the last century, one of the most important, life defining technologies, is the screen, particularly the electric screen. The screen and the book are two very different information media. In an attempt to understand this, Marshall McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy . He documented how in no small way, the book created modernity. What can be called Western culture was conceived and recorded in print. Writing in 1960, McLuhan concluded the screen was displacing print. This would create radical change for Western culture, here we are.
One great example of how the screen has radically changed culture is American politics. The screen, most essentially the television screen, completely uprooted the politics established by four centuries of print – newspapers, magazines, and books. The literal presses of the 1st Amendment were the foundation of republican political knowledge and a just as important aspect of political communication – no longer. The screen also completely displaced physical political space, destroying essential democratic organization such as the neighborhood association and county political party.
Using 30 second ads and 10 second soundbites politics adopted marketing and advertising, the communication methods and means of industry. The give and take, the robust discussion, of the townhall or party precinct meeting disappeared. Political communication became exclusively controlled top-down through the television, direct response limited to a select few in polling samples or once every two years with the ballot. The communication organization necessary for democracy completely displaced.
In the last thirty years, control of the electric screen, only several decades established, changed. The three broadcast networks that controlled television via government monopoly were challenged first by cable-tv then the internet, which instantaneously evolved into a system controlled by a handful of leviathan corporate platforms, creating a completely dysfunctional politics. This is best represented, though by no means absolutely or in any way exclusively, by our present reality-tv president. What can be said of the changing dynamics of the screen when Puck ascends to the Oval Office?
Maybe most surreal is the recent “political” assassinations and attempts. One thing in common, the assassins have no real political affiliation, no real political association outside the screen's endless streams. These have been individuals reacting to the screen by briefly stepping away from it and using the most anti-democratic act possible, the ending of life with an act of violence. Maybe most disconcerting, this instant act beyond the screen then returns to the screen, briefly and overwhelmingly defining interaction through the screen.
Today's highly dysfunctional American politics is very much the politics of the screen, a politics both yet to be addressed or understood, except as unexamined and farcical notions labeled progress and innovation. It’s time to break the screen's political monopoly. The only way to do this is for Americans to come together in physical space, face to face, in groups facilitating discussion. They will quickly find the needs, concerns, and beliefs held in common are much, much greater than the divisions sold to them by the screen.