Screaming Into the Megaphone

by Bruce Coffman

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

That's from an excellent Guardian article, linked at the end of this entry. What does that sound like? Social media. America in general. Yes. Our Democratic "leaders" fell down on the job of keeping up with the times and the right seized that opportunity. They learned how to scream into the megaphone. And it kicked our asses.

Please take some time to read the full article for a look at how our inability to message is killing us, and our country. Here I'm sharing some of the key points I gleaned from the article, but the full thing is definitely worth the read for anyone interested in how to actually reach people with valuable information. We have to do this to ever have any hope of encouraging people to get involved and vote if we ever have another election and to stand up and fight until then.

The Guardian article says the idea that dumb media make us all dumber was part of the very earliest critiques of newspapers, pamphlets and the tabloid press in the late 18th century, and has continued right up to the present day. Right now Netflix is dumbing down their offerings to accommodate our dwindling attention spans and our insistence on constantly scrolling on our handheld devices instead of paying attention to... a single damn thing.

It was once thought that the internet was going to solve this problem. and that we, the public at large, were going to seize back the means of communication. "The internet really did bring new voices into a national discourse that for too long had been controlled by far too narrow (too white, too male, too affluent) a group," the article says. "But it did not return our democratic culture and modes of thinking to a more serious, thoughtful era. The writing got shorter and the images and video more plentiful until the internet birthed a new form of discourse that was a combination of word and image: meme culture. A meme can be clever, even revelatory, but it is not discourse in (any meaningful way.)"

Now, everyone has to scream to be heard, and public discourse has devolved to everyone shouting variations of the same snippets, phrases, slogans. Think "Make America Great Again." The people screaming the loudest get the most attention. And it was in this setting that the guy with the loudest megaphone, the biggest mouth, the most "cult of personality" in the entire history of the United States, rose to power. Donald Fucking Trump.

The article nails Trump's psyche, saying, "Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse." Pathetic that American sheep fell for it, but it is what it is.

The article concludes with this rather grim but accurate wrap-up: "What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention? Who cares if people have a negative reaction so long as they have some reaction? You can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Those are the choices in the... attention age, and it’s very hard for me to blame these people for choosing the latter."

My key takeaway is that it's time for the sane among us to drop the Mr. Nice Guy horse shit and fuck shit up and make people pay attention. Your thoughts? Drop them in the comments!

FULL GUARDIAN ARTICLE

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