On some Mechanism’s of Media
Sifting through instagram, your attention freezes on a startling image and title. You click and consume. Another title appears. Perhaps from a government source about important matters. Yet, for countless reasons, including the flaccidness of familiarity, you forgo this read.
The exploration of our psyches and motivations for social media engagement is not the subject to be discussed. Rather, this will be a brief provision of caution from bright minds past concerning the cost of unconscious media consumption and engagement.
“To think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration” - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Concerning captions and the written word, one factor opposing the conscious consumer is the trending vagueness of sociopolitical language, especially around unpopular subjects. Though our ability to abstract is one of our powers, the abstraction also allows intermediates to distance and divorce the social/political reality from popular representation, producing the hazy realm of the specious and euphemistic. Orwell points out that this realm helps the powers that be avoid exciting the masses by obscuring words from their visual correlates.
“Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all” - Andre Breton
But what of the explicit, indisputable “fact” that is the photograph? These cheap tricks can’t prevail within an expanding visual economy, right? Wrong. Visual media is never fully “pure”.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explores photographies multifaceted role in communicating pain and suffering, yet contest the assumption of photographs as "fact" and explores their limitations. The primary limitations are two-fold, one on the producer side of an image and one on the consumer side. Sontag’s first reminder is of the producer’s “choice” when publicizing photography.
“To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” -Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
This choice is not ultimate or inherently manipulative. Sontag acknowledges that photos exist across the gradient of intending to evoke or to show. Further, the intentions of the photographer are still only one end, whereas the meaning/interpretation is at the whims of the audiences sensibilities. This other end is the consumer element, that so long as our eyes are connected to our brains and our brains are connected to our hearts, consumer will subjectively impute value and meaning to visual media in our naturally reductive ways.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
The conscious consumer will do well to meditate on the above quote when consuming and engaging with media. Is what is portrayed and debated possibly creating a confined battlefield? Where might you be wrong? What might you be missing?
Adam Grant’s Think Again, and more solemnly, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, both cover the need to pro-actively examine and be willing to falsify/refine one’s beliefs.
These reminders are not revelatory, but hopefully they can be seen as preventative media hygiene (a la don’t take candy [written copy/images] from strangers [anyone] in white vans [without considering…] ). These reminders are not to join the digital downers crew too bashing on modernity, but to instill a healthy suspicion that the advent of social media and information delivery is in many ways an “improved means to an unimproved ends” (as Thoreau said more generally about many technologies). We can deliver more volume quicker, with the consequence of fatiguing our sensitivity and scrutiny.