A Citizen's Guide to the Gutenberg Galaxy
Welcome to the Gutenberg Galaxy...
Here the Medium
is the
Mess age...
In the Gutenberg Galaxy the messages get lost in the media, the medium becomes the message. Hence, honesty, validity and accuracy are devalued as the media creates images, brands, celebrities, and myths, and then employs armies of people to breathe life into these artificial creations, to spin, exaggerate and distort.
The Gutenberg Galaxy is an illusionist's box of tricks gone awry, where distortion is the currency and the masses acquire, like a ghoulish fetish, the personas of airbrushed and cosmetically enhanced super beings; the tabloid creations of slick-tongued ad-men and other sycophants, bottle-tanned androids, and Piers Morgan.
The Gutenberg Galaxy is also a book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he analyzes the effects of mass media, especially the printing press, on European culture and human consciousness. And he cautions us not to focus too much on the content of the message but instead to consider the medium and the subtle changes that it implies for our lives.
The Press
We rely on the press to keep us to date with latest news. Frequently, however, we are also subjected to some strange world views from our commentators. Set out below are a selection of some rare examples....
Max Hastings
"we simply can't have all this openness and honesty"
Daily Mail columnist, Max Hastings undertook a character assassination of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, yesterday.
Hastings, in particular, focussed on the alledged sexual allegations made against Assange by a Swedish prosecutor. He acknowledged he knows nothing about Assange's guilt in this case or otherwise.
He simply doesn't like the look of him, Hastings can't contain his contempt: "he is a sleazeball, however the legal proceedings turn out".
We've got news for you Max, nobody cares.
The Threat To Our Way Of Life
Max's attack is not solely confined to Assange's sexual antics, he seems more concerned about the threat that Wikileaks poses for our very way of life. He protests, we simply can't have all this openness and honesty, we simply can't know everything there is to know.
There must be some privacy; diplomats and politians and generals and cranks must have their private moments to make decisions that affect citizens lives.
According to Max, the public has no right to know anything of the antics of toxic dumpers Trafigura, or indeed, climate scientists cooking the books, and Joe Public certainly has no right to be viewing video footage from a US Army Apache helicopter as the gunners relish in the carnage they've caused - 15 innocent civilians lie dead and the lunatic on the end of the gun says "nice".
We certainly didn't need to know about all those expenses fiddling Westminster and Euro MPs. We don't need to know why papers relating to the death of Dr. David Kelly will be hidden for 70 years. We don't need to read the recent FSA report into the failings of management and oversight at RBS.
The concealment of all these private moments are a part of our democratic way of life, indeed, concealment, deceit, sleeze and greed - these are the cornerstones of our politics, of state legitimacy.
If Wikileaks threatens this legitimacy then this can only be good. And it certainly can only be good that people like Blair and Bush, who's private moments have ended a million lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, are exposed as duplicitous ego-centric self-deceivers.
It might just be the case that what really worries the Max Hastings of this world is the decreasing need for citizens to have things interpreted for them by commentators who spend every waking moment providing superficial observations.
(ED. Yeah, big up for Wikileaks, how else would we know what those Thetans are up to)
Will Hutton
Print some more funny money
Making sense of the world is hard work, that job is being made increasingly difficult when individuals like Will Hutton insist on gibbering on about nothing.
Hutton, Observer hack, former boss of the Work Foundation and regular media commentator on all things economic, is a time waster. He certainly is not the Dalai Lama of Social Democracy, he singularly fails to enlighten.
He tells us: "The markets have issued a stark warning. The old common sense is killing the western economy and Britain's with it. We must now act to save ourselves." Fuck me, send for Bruce Willis.
And pray, what action should we take? Will says, print some more money and insist on how it gets spent.
Wait a minute, so the old common sense, that you can run the world's economy on debt, is past it's sell by date and Will wants to challenge this received wisdom by printing more funny money.
And what's more, Will wants the politicians to recognise the 'interconnections' between the State and Capitalism. The State facilitates the money making machine, it also has to care for its casualties. The way Will tells it, the State and Capitalism are like partners in crime bound by a mutually beneficial relationship. Get it? We are all in this together.
That's all right then, tell Bruce not to bother, please.... Capitalism moulds and mangles the State to suit its money grubbing pursuits. Will should read the Capitalist Manifesto and see how it exudes its core message "The Greatest Good of the Fewest Number". ( The Capitalist Manifesto never has been written, you'd never catch a capitalist telling you what he thinks.)
The capitalist cares nothing for politics and invertebrate politicians, talking about some mythical 'third way' to a better future. When Henry Ford couldn't sell cars in Detroit in the 1930s, when the American car workers were starving, he sold his cars in Moscow for Russian gold and kept his own larder full.
The capitalist doesn't worry about a bit of global instability, where Will sees an abyss, the capitalist sees a dark and welcoming opportunity to explore new profit adventures. The capitalist has no time for politicians or people like Will but he recognises their usefulness. The capitalist knows that the pursuit of social democracy places anyone advocating this position in an impossible bind, an impossible ethical dilemma. The social democrat bemoans the lack of ethics in politics and business but does nothing about it because to do so would endanger all those plans for a more caring society - based on money grubbing.
People like Will Hutton challenge nothing and no one, all they want to do is tweak, to fine tune, not to manage the machine but to manage for it.
The latest blinding insight coming from The Work Foundation, 'happy workers are more productive' .... outstanding Will!A. N. Wilson
Journalist thinks Britain is a bit 'untidy'A. N. Wilson, writing in the Daily Mail, doesn't think Britain is in a complete mess, just a little untidy.
Wilson was writing to complain about the way TV programmes like Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs misrepresent the reality of Edwardian society.
His argument runs as follows; life was genuinely awful for the working class in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods but this is never portrayed accurately in period dramas.
Actor, Hugh Bonneville, star of Downton Abbey, inspired Wilson to write the article when he spouted off about life being well ordered prior to WW1, when the "structure of society worked".Wilson counters with:
"Switch off your telly and think for five minutes of a Britain without free hospitals, free schools, or adequate pensions for the old and the infirm. Think of a world where a tiny proportion of the very rich lord it over the rest, and ask whether that would be a ‘structure of society which worked’ ".
Well, actually it did work jolly well for the privileged few, so well in fact, that Cameron and crew are taking us back there - with the best of intentions of course.
Like so many piffle spouters, Wilson's is a confused individual. This is a man who was destined for a life in the church but dropped out of his studies and avowed himself an atheist. Then, he spent a decade or two writing anti-religious tracts. Having got it all out of his system, he then decided that he was a bit religious afterall. Time-waster!
Wilson is right to point out how nasty everything was in that earlier time. Things now are not exactly brilliant either although a hundred years have elapsed. Would his time not be better spent focussing on now? Now, while the Bullingdon Boys are busy sweeping away all the crumbs fallen from the rich man's table.
Actors, like Hugh Bonneville, live in worlds created by other people, they only speak the words that are put into their mouthes. Often their celebrity as fantasy characters fails to sustain them existentially and then they feel the need to spout, to reach out beyond the fantasy. Sometimes they take things even further, they don red noses for Comic Relief and travel to African villages full of starving children, in an effort to really touch base. Why don't they just get their cheque books out and spare everyone the travelogue.
As for Wilson, he really needs to question his rationale. What exactly is his complaint. That television misrepresents history or that actors get sucked into representations that they are paid to present?*************************
Seen recently in a music magazine?
As the guitarist in Guns N Roses, Slash was part of the most dangerous group on the planet. Rock gods, the band left a trail of destruction in their wake, often prompting riots with late arrivals and no shows.
So, the group arrived late and sometimes didn't turn up, they smashed up some hotel rooms. Dangerous? Rock gods?