“We invent things, and thereafter they invent us.” This is a fundamental principle in the media theory articulated by Marshall McLuhan, but it is rarely considered because we are usually so enamoured by the ingenuity of our inventions that we fail to consider the ways in which they invent us.
A brilliant essay by Jonathan Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”, in the May 2022 edition of The Atlantic Monthly magazine deserves careful reading and thought. Its insights do much to explain the factious irrationality that has been generated by social media, an adjunct of the internet that was supposed to facilitate and deepen communication, but instead has created angry disputes with irresolvable differences. What went wrong?
The metaphor that Haidt uses to illustrate this condition is the biblical reference to Babel in Genesis 11:1-9, in which Yahweh prevents the people of Shinar from building a tower to “the heavens” by confusing “their language, that they might not understand one another’s speech.” If we commonly agree on the meaning of words, then we can communicate, understand each other, and work together in a common cause. When misinformation and disinformation obscure the meaning of words, then a gulf of confusion separates people, the cohesive structure of society no longer holds, and language causes disintegration rather than integration.
Haidt, like many thinkers, has recognized the extent to which the things we invent are able to restructure how we feel, understand and behave, usually in ways that we had never anticipated. This is what Marshall McLuhan was trying to summarize in his fundamental principle of media theory. Writing, for example, captures a person’s ideas in a medium that transcends time, and connects the past to the present with a literal precision that was not available to memory. The psychosocial dynamics created by writing are entirely different from those of the spoken word and their recited stories. Oral cultures lock collective experience into an eternal present that is only able to exist within the reach of continual hearing; literate cultures lock collective experience into an eternal present that is made available through the activation of its silent symbols.
The printing press, invented in the late 15th century, amplified the power of the written word, and with it the ideas of any individual who could write. Anyone who was able to read could weigh the ideas of the author against his or her own ideas and opinions. In simplest terms, the unintended consequence of the printing press was to create the thoughtful individual, to destroy the authority of monolithic institutions, and to form the functional basis for what we call democracy.
The disastrous religious wars of the Reformation were fuelled by the effects of the printing press. It split Catholic Christendom in two, with the Protestant side subdividing into various denominations. Monarchies fell because of the printing press. Consequently, the French philosophers of the 18th century Enlightenment had to devise a new way for societies to organize and govern themselves—instead of the divine right to rule, they proposed democracies composed of five “estates”: a parliament that made laws, a civil service that implemented laws, a constabulary that enforced laws, and the courts that judged laws. The “fifth estate” was the press, with its obligation to keep the individual informed so the public could evaluate the entire system and vote for the changes that they deemed necessary.
Newspapers, books, and pamphlets became the primary sources of information until the arrival of electricity at the end of the 19th century, which brought such inventions as the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television and eventually the internet. Of course, people exchanged ideas and opinions in conversation prior to these electronic inventions, but the influence of eccentric notions were fairly small and isolated, leaving societies with a general consensus about who they were and what they believed.
Even the internet, until about 2011, according to Haidt, primarily disseminated information in the same manner as the printing press, contributing to the education of people and supporting the democratic processes. “The early internet of the 1990s,” wrote Haidt, “with its chat rooms, message boards, and email… made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable.” Facebook, which eventually emerged as the dominant platform, grew from a few million to about 3 billion users. “What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?” asked Haidt. Indeed, social media did inspire the so-called Arab Spring, and revolutions that shook dictatorships throughout the Middle East and the world. Google Translate even allowed people of different languages to freely and seamlessly communicate, so humanity seemed to have become one large family that was integrated by the sharing of information.
The aspirations for social media were high and idealistic. When the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, was preparing to take his business public, he wrote to potential investors, “Today, our society has reached another tipping point,” where Facebook hopes “to rewire the way people spread and consume information”. By giving them “the power to share,” he optimistically claimed that they could “once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.” Zuckerberg was likely thinking in short historical terms. But, as with the printing press of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, social media unleashed transformations that were never imagined.
To Be Continued
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
This article was originally posted on Fri Jul 14 and republished on Mon Jul 17 to align with my Monday to Friday radio schedule.
Top image credit: image credit: Facebook backlash – courtesy www.shopcatalog.com via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)