“In modern thought, (if not in fact)
Nothing is that doesn’t act,
So that is reckoned wisdom which
Describes the scratch but not the itch.”
– Anonymous Stanza referenced in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man when mentioning Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’
Our lives, careers, reputations and identities are now essentially digital constructs. We must understand this well whether it attracts or repels us. The internet is impacting our methods and capacities for concentration, attention, interpretation, assimilation etc. Our monkey brains are now distracted by a hundred lit screens and links. Social media has folded inside out from being a circle of friends to an always on performance of manicured imagery on a stage. Its cadence is faster, its content shorter. It is now enabled through learning which humans cannot match.
This is not a Luddite scare. It is a well rationalised body of knowledge. We must appreciate it to be able to use it well. As early as 2011, Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, painted a dire picture of the effect of the Internet on our mind. Since then, smartphones and cheap bandwidth has made the internet truly ubiquitous. It is the phone screen that has become the canvas of our lives.
I have been a student and practitioner of communication. I have read many of the 20th- century media theorists and thinkers namely — Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer Marshall McLuhan, Umberto Eco, Walter Ong, Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Shoshana Zuboff. All of them foretold or saw this reality. Zuboff’s termed it ‘The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism’ in her eponymously titled book.
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us” said Marshall McLuhan and his axiom that “the medium is the message” is fully manifest. McLuhan’s view is that mediums matter more than content. Media is impacting its own matter. Mediums are not neutral, and content is anything but king. An oral culture is distinct from a written culture. Television turned everything into entertainment, and social media taught us to think with the crowd. Do not imagine that exceptions will make the rule.
It is the common rules that govern all creation and consumption across a medium that change people and society. Eventually the medium acquires a vice like grip over content. Switch on any news channel and keep aside the search for ideological neutrality, objectivity etc. Just see the format – the look, tone, temperament of the anchors, the graphics, the conflict, the decibel levels, the absence of depth, the sensationalism. This is true across the world, in varying degrees. Why? Simply because it is a business. The news content is assessed for return via ratings in every minute of its existence.
In his deeply impactful book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” published in 1985, Postman argued that junk television is the belief system that every subject in the world is a branch of entertainment. And there is no biz like show biz. “Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.” said Postman, in an aggrieved, moralising tone.
Entertainment subsumes our expectations for everything. Viable candidates in all fields of life must be able to capture the screen. Media platforms now algorithmically obsess the world with the same narrow spectrum of topics and sameness is now ingrained.
In the recent past, be it on account of the rise of radicalism, post-truth narratives, the absence of facts or the growth of manipulation – the mood turned against Silicon Valley. Henry Kissinger, no less, wrote a book on Artificial Intelligence. Elon Musk warned of its dire consequences. But for the most part, the spotlight has been on successful billionaires, corporations and methods. It has not been on the development and direction of technology itself.
The pace of development is such that anyone armed with only facts becomes outdated soon. A generic, fact-based critique is attacked as Luddite. The furore on privacy is a bit passe. Generative AI is only accelerating the mode of compliant dullness. Where is the freedom to choose?
Social media is a show cabinet for the individual. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist claims that the way the Instagram works is changing how teenagers think. The need for approval of how they look and what they say and what they’re doing, is forever increasing. The view of self is now constructed from online evaluation of others. Twitter compressed ideas to a finite set of alphabets. You originate but more often you join a discussion. How others react and respond decides your idea’s worth.
In 1970s for the first time, it became manifest that it’s attention not money that is our most precious commodity and a threatened resource. Economists Thomas Davenport and John Beck called it the driving force of our society and termed it ‘the attention economy’. Jenny Odell’s book – “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” was published in 2019. She explains how attention becomes driven by norm. You are compelled to pay attention to what others pay attention to.
Traditionally, fetching and retaining attention was the job of advertising agencies and media. Today, attention wielding is an essential life skill. In the past, the patent solution for breaking through noise was to be the loudest, flashiest, and most repetitive. Brands would pay for buying attention off a rate card. Institutions owned and gated information. Managers lived in a command-and-control organisational environment. Cut to date, and we’re all competing for one another’s attention in a downwards spiral.
We must think of this at the level of society and culture. Who we are and who we may become. The availability of technical means for self-projection and a wider community building has transformed social networks to social media. This social media turns everything we share into content. The playing field is catering to the lowest common denominator. Grand ideas for public consumption are tossed around in the same chaos as capsules of bawdy humour. The notion that our thoughts, beliefs, family, friends, feelings all feed a brand is yet not grasped and appreciated. Yet, every moment of our lives feeds the personal brand even if we do not wish it so.
This phenomenon has affected democratic politics. Governance is less critical than topicality and fame. Everything is measured in terms of likes and shares. The power a social network brings to politics is, by itself, something worthwhile. After all, fame is the basis for electoral politics. To become visible and develop a brand doesn’t not necessarily implicate skills, accomplishment, dedication to service or good governance. But the issue is that the algorithm rewards theatrics, spectacle and conflict. Performance, intelligence, institution building is secondary.
In an era of online personal brand management, distinctions between “who am I?” and “what I do for fame” fade away. Everything is temporary content. This flux invades our life, thoughts, work open to the world online.
To reduce ourselves to brands, however, is to do make us smaller than who we are.
Certainly, we will risk a typecasting of our own invention. We are not rated products. We are not popular currency. We are not a leader board.
Think in terms of institutions, intrinsic merit, the majesty of the truth and empathy for others.
Is that only about becoming a popular brand, or can it mean more?
Shubhranshu Singh is vice president, marketing – domestic & IB, CVBU, Tata Motors. He writes Simply Speaking, a weekly column on Storyboard18. Views expressed are personal.