I went to the meeting on the internet at Marxism. I got there late, during the introduction, so I may have missed this point being made (however, no one brought it up in the general discussion). We are, I think, getting a good grasp on the internet. Put very roughly, it has its uses but it's not everything.
The hype about Twitter revolutions is just that. It's a simple rhetorical ploy to take agency away from ordinary people. What has made the Arab Spring, the working class or a website? Twitter and Facebook are globally popular websites, why isn't there a global revolution? Well, that's easy, goes the second half of the argument, what the Arabs want is what we have here in the West.
It should be clear how silly this argument now is. The Arab Spring is a revolution against western imposed dictatorship, never mind the fact that fewer and fewer people in the West want what they have; witness Greece. The whole argument is a gross overextension of the generally reasonable idea that The Medium is the Message. The ultimate medium is class society, it affects everything.
But we can surely do better than on the one hand this on the other hand that. Yes face to face relationships are the best form of communication but, as the philosopher once said, you can't always get what you want. The internet, the latest extension of electronic media, is here to stay, we have to deal with it. How does the internet in its various manifestations affect mass consciousness?
The best starting point is, still, Marshall McLuhan. All media are extensions of a human aspect. The telescope is an extension of the eye, the phone an extension of the ear; the internet is an electronic medium, it is an extension of the nervous system. A prime effect of electronic media is the reunification of cause and effect.
The President of the United States can declare war on another country. Whereas before you might read about X number of dead or hear another person read about X number of ships sunk, homes destroyed and so on, all after the fact, today you can watch the bombs land within minutes of the declaration of war. This means there is no (or should be no) more periphery, no dark corners, no overlooked facts. A consistently peddled fear about modern media is that they will see the end of privacy. Modern information management/spin/manipulation involves distraction rather than censorship.
Radio started out as a social medium, people gathered around it. Later on it became a weapon in the teenage battle for privacy. It's noise was a protective wall of sound (turn down that racket!). TV began as a social activity. As sets got cheaper (not to mention smaller) and channels proliferated the TV experience became individualised. It's now common to find houses with a TV in every room.
Just as TV was becoming less and less collective the internet began to rise. The internet began as an individual experience. The social, collective veneer of the internet is just that. It doesn't take much looking to see through the internet's non-hierarchical aspirations. As was pointed out in the meeting, if you create a successful Twitter page you will gain followers.
If it does anything the pattern of the internet consumption reinforces bourgeois ideology, it's fundamental basis being the unbound, undifferentiated individual. This contradicts its other effect (reunification of cause and effect). Internet activism, such as it is, veers between two extremes; the sudden, rapid spread of solidarity and listless, ineffectual gesture politics.
The newspaper is of course and equally bourgeois invention. It's very being implies an atomised citizenry. Moving type implies a separation between cause and effect. You can read a newspaper and find articles about factory closures on one page and increased drug abuse and violence on the next, and the two notions are never linked.
But we know the still large amount of labour needed to write, print and distribute a newspaper can be used to generate organisation and encourage solidarity. The internet costs very little in living labour. This is a very attractive feature for single issue campaigns and/or cottage industry politics, but it is a poor medium for building a revolutionary organisation. Little wonder that people who venerate the internet generally denigrate organisation.
None of this is reason for pooh-poohing electronic media, however. People are using the internet. It is helping shape public opinion. The ruling class is busy using it to manufacture consent. We should continue discussing modern media and its effects in order to overcome them in the course of transforming our society.
