There’s nothing new about tendencies to hold political views counter to the facts. George Orwell wrote about this in 1946, as a late instance. As for the conspiracy theorists’ methodology of finding what they want to find by abstruse means and bizarre interpretations, Jonathan Swift was making fun of this well-known tendency on the part of power-mad authorities in the 18th century. Were I more conversant with the Classical Age, I’m sure I would know observations on all of these topics and more that we’ve seen in the past few years made by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
What was new this time is suggested in Marshall McLuhan’s most famous pronouncement: the medium is the message. As he observed, the leaders of the 1930s and 40s, including the European dictators, achieved their power through the then-new medium of radio. Radio created a direct relationship between the voice of the leader and individuals in their homes.
The medium came of age when nearly every home had radio, and an entire nation—if not much of the world—could hear a broadcast simultaneously. So the voice of the leader spoke to every individual—every family, neighborhood, city-- in every home and many public and social spaces at the same time.
Radio also brought an immediacy to news and documentary broadcasts. And of course, it brought sound, and therefore drama. The news was a different kind of story.
There had been nothing like it before. There were no prior standards for discerning or judging what was true or false, except the credibility of the speaker and the authority of the radio networks.
By the 1960s, television had transformed how citizens received political information, though the change was perhaps less radical: television combined the immediacy and presence in the home of radio with the visuals of the movie newsreel and the accompanying narration of newspapers.
This combination elevated the power of the image, broadly defined beyond the simply visual. This either enhanced leaders (JFK) or undermined them (LBJ, Nixon), and visual information of events either supported or contradicted the reality the leader claimed. It took awhile before viewers could readily discriminate and make judgments based on what they saw on television.
Then came the Internet and shortly afterwards, social media. The nature of these emphasized features of radio and television that were absent.
When radio was dominant, it was largely the product of a limited number of networks (in many countries, that number was one.) The same was true when television dominated.
In the US there was CBS, NBC and ABC. Each of these companies had a news and information division modeled on newspaper journalism, which attempted to adhere to best practices, and standards of accuracy and fairness.
In addition, because the federal government controlled the airwaves on behalf of the public and allocated wavelengths, government imposed standards, such as those incorporated in the Fairness Doctrine. As mass media beholden to national audiences, each network had as well a Standards and Practices department, to limit offensive words for example, as well as to protect the company against content that might lead to sponsor unhappiness and boycotts, as well as defamation, libel and other lawsuits.
All of this meant that viewers received basically the same information at the same time (especially when all three networks broadcast or covered the same events simultaneously.) That information was vetted, and vouched for by named and recognized large organizations with a news pedigree. There were abuses, of course, including censorship, and a dearth of dissenting information, which in one case—the Vietnam War—caused a crisis of confidence and credibility. But basically these were features of the mass media of television and radio.
These features rapidly and radically declined in the 1980s and 90s. Cable and satellite television brought a proliferation of stations and then mini-networks. At the same time, national standards enforced by regulations such as the Fairness Doctrine disappeared when those regulations disappeared. Now mini-networks specializing in news and information could maintain an ideological slant and even distort information to fit a political agenda, or to create one. Viewers of one of these networks who swallowed whole the information and opinions it provided, without testing the accuracy of it by consulting sources outside the network, could have radically different apprehensions of the no-longer common reality.
That’s how it came to work in theory, and for viewers of Fox, in reality. For on that network, political ideology and the company line clearly overwhelmed the news standards attempting to institutionalize accuracy and fairness that other new networks employed.
Enter the Internet and social media. Billions of computers—which today means everything from desktops to phones—can both create and consume content, with minimal control by a social media platform. They all have equal access to the same large universe of information. Individuals choose their particular sources of information, and the associates they communicate with.
Beyond this, I have little useful to say about social media because I don’t participate in it. I am not on Facebook, I have never tweeted. So far I don't even have a smartphone. Obviously I got as far as blogs, and so I understand the ability to instantly publish. I have smaller experience with the power to connect directly, from past participation on group blogs like Daily Kos, or through comments to political or special interest sites (like the old Star Trek bulletin boards.)
But I do think it is intuitively obvious that the power of the Trump presidency is derived from the power and nature of social media, and especially from the fact that he was functionally the first social media President, and very nearly the first social media dictator.
So for those who wish to research this Dark Age as well as the age of Trump, I suggest starting with social media and how it shaped what happened. Because I believe how it shaped what happened is not entirely obvious.
It is obvious to me, however, that social media created virtual communities that have features in common with other communities, or that otherwise it exaggerated tendencies seen in other social settings.
Many of these communities are based on common interests, such as gardening or music, and are benign and beneficial. But communities can also develop based as much on who they oppose as on who they include. People can derive feelings of identity and well-being from engaging with people who differentiate themselves from other people. Those feelings tend to override individual judgments, because to disagree with the group is to be outside the group. This is seen in something as simple as office gossip. But you can certainly imagine it among conspiracy theorists. And the more radical the belief, the more necessary that associates be true believers, or else the basis of solidarity, membership and companionship evaporates. Then once again you're out in the cold and uncertainty, alone.
Social media connects people to a wider world, and not just one way. Because there are others who talk about aspects of that world, provide their perspective from someplace far away, people feel connected to the world and to each other in a new way. If their opinions are shared (even if those opinions are shaped by the dialogue), they participate in that world. They are involved, perhaps for the first time. The world outside is not something they can only dimly see, without much comprehension.
On the less positive side, they may find people online who will confirm the prejudices and resentments based on them that they held secretly and with some tentative shame. Now there are others, armed with scientific arguments, with stunning historical interpretations previously hidden from them by those establishment politicians and those network executives.
That information will be skewed and bogus, but probably augmented by videos dramatizing it. That's another feature of the digital world: easy to use editing tools available to everyone can be used to edit images with a professional patina, recombine them out of context and even change them through digital manipulation, accompanied by portentious narration. Once videos like this are viewed on the Internet, algorithms kick in that display other videos and material with the same information and point of view, giving the impression of corroboration rather than just repetition. These algorithms, used automatically on media and social media sites, may drive home a particular conclusion without ever presenting rebutting information or a contrary view.
There is also particular power in something so absorbing, simultaneous and constant as on-line interchanges. The Internet is always on, there are always new messages. Even if social media is still very limited in terms of sense data—it’s mostly words, with some imagery and a little sound—it is compelling, addicting. And it can move easily beyond cyberspace to define the rest of life.
These must be factors in the dominant presence of social media. That dominance in turn is a source of its power. Trump’s triumph may have been his management of so much of society’s attention (i.e. kept always on himself.)
That dominance currently involves a feedback mechanism: people get a buzz from constant attention to social media, resulting in the power social media attains from commanding constant attention. But there may be another factor: sheer novelty. It’s the new medium. Eventually, people may get tired of it all the time. And it won’t necessarily be only when replaced by a newer medium. People are already drifting back to old ones, or at least reincorporating them. Even now in many if not most peoples' lives, it has its place but it isn't everything.
So it may take time, but people may someday once again be able to sit, stand or walk without staring at social media feeds on their phones. (This may already be happening. Back when I was among other people, I noted that more people at a cafe in Menlo Park, epicenter of the computer society, were not staring constantly at their phones or ipads, than I observed back here in Arcata, especially around students.)
There is that other aspect of novelty that previously pertained to radio and television. Social and related media may be especially powerful because people have not fully developed or learned how to apply standards of judgment, or even skepticism, to information absorbed through a new medium. It takes time and the ability to step back before those standards are widely established.
This is perhaps especially true when many people captivated by social media haven’t previously developed skills of assessing information in other media. They may not have much experience in the perils of abstractions. And they are up against very skillful manipulators who’ve adapted old scams to the Internet.
I used to resist the usage of “viral” applied to viral information, viral tweets, “gone viral.” I resented even the prior assertion that “language is a virus.” I believe language is powerful, but if it is a virus, its antidote is other language (as well as, in some cases, simply observing the real world.) So I don’t see the reason for the metaphor.
On the basis of information alone the virus metaphor breaks down, because the antidote to a virus is antibodies, or a vaccine that disables it. Standards of judgment don’t destroy information—they assess it. After assessing it they may reject it entirely, but more often, it is rejected in part—it is mostly inaccurate, or it is being misinterpreted, or the evidence for it is not adequate. (Perhaps the metaphor works better if it’s the disease caused by the virus that is destroyed.)
Still, there is undeniably something akin to a physical virus about information through social media. There is something beyond this version of the viral, that probably cannot be understood without investigating in detail how social media operated these past four years. We have to understand how our institutional boundaries and perennial norms could be so easily breached and defied, almost indifferently. How we seemingly could not find a core, a place, however small, of certainty. Was it entirely the fragmentation mirroring the fragmented information of social media? Or something more?
Some features of ideological conversions are well known, and that social bonding is strong in maintaining membership. But I would look at why associations created by bonding through social media appear to be especially strong (is it because they are constantly renewed, every single day?) and how realities created in cyberspace can survive contact with the actual world.
Apart from the cynically ambitious enablers in office and the ambitiously cynical manipulators in the digital darkness, does this go beyond what we understand as politics? Is at least some of this on-line zealotry a new form of debased religious ecstasy? Is immersion in a group bound by belief in a system that explains everything in simple, extreme--even archetypal-- and emotionally transporting terms, demanding action in the name of rescue, redemption and patriotism, just a short step to a mindless but cunning and violent, keening mob?
That Trump will be known for (among other things) presiding over the unnecessary disaster and deaths of a viral pandemic may also be the key to understanding this era otherwise as well. Because whatever else he was, Trump was a virus. And he almost killed us.
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