Transcripts For ALJAZAM Listening Post 20131124

Mcluhan made a series of pronouncements about the changing media landscape. What he said then still resonates in the wired world we inhabit today. Mcluhan was writing about the effects of the mass media on contemporary life, talking mostly about television. However, his ideas and predictions proved prophetic and, in the tumult of todays digital revolution, a lot of what mcluhan said seems as relevant now as it was 50 years ago. In part two of the program, well speak with a present day media theorist about mcluhan. Evgeny morozov also has some interesting and, at times, contrarian views on new and social media and how many of us see its potential impact on society. In short, he thinks were naive, idealistic and should be prepared to be disappointed. But first, the media now compared to the message then from Marshall Mcluhan. At the speed of light, theres no sequence. Everything happens at the same instant. When you dont have a physical body, youre a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you and this, i think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. Theres a new kind of humor that exists in america called the one liner. You used to have jokes, stories, but no more. Only one liners now. Everything happens at once and theres no continuity, theres no connection, theres no follow through. Its just all now. I mean, Marshall Mcluhan was a canadian academic who studied renaissance literature, but strangely created a second career for himself as a sort of media guru, explaining to people what the effect of the mass media, which were relatively new in the 1960s, what effect they had on peoples lives. One of the effects of tv is to make and to shorten the amount of time that people can Pay Attention to anything. And he became incredibly sort of trendy. He even appeared in a woody allen film. Now, Marshall Mcluhan is, in terms of it being a high intensity. When two characters are sort of having a discussion about what he was on about, because he had this kind of strange way of talking where you couldnt quite put your finger on what he was saying, but it sounded very, very interesting. Because i happen to have mr mcluhan right here, so. Yeah, just let me. Come over here a second. Tell him. I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. He was interviewed in places like Playboy Magazine and look magazine, which was one of the american equivalents of life. He was profiled in places like time and newsweek. I think playboy called him the metaphysician of the media. When youre saying the medium is the message, youre really saying that the ground is the message, its no the content. The actual ground of services. Its not what you say on the telephone, its the fact that the Telephone Service is environmental. Theres no journalist, reporter or media professional, anyone who works within these communication enterprises, who hasnt heard, you know, the medium is the message or the Global Village. The medium is the message is the most famous and yet controversial statement in the media and communication studies. It refers to the significance of the form over the content. That a medium is not something neutral. It does something to people. It takes hold of them, it roughs them. Up, it massages them, it bumps them around. The general roughing up that any society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended to be indicated in that title. So in the age of the social media like twitter and facebook, we can see how the collective experience is really communicated through certain technology, rather than what they are really talking about, so the material is more important than content. The Global Village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody elses business. Village people arent that much in love with each other. And the Global Village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations. Look at, for instance, the coverage of the syrian uprising turned civil war. Most on the coverage on the ground is actually coming from people in front of their laptops or literally operating out of mobile phones. These connections would have been unheard of, had it not been for the technology itself, so for once one could feel, you know, both connected and perhaps even empathetic with the human experiences of others that are extremely distant and share little to no experiences in common. Obviously, one of the extraordinary things about the arab spring is that its the first major series of moments in history that were both in part made and also understood through the new media. In other words, forms of Communications Like facebook, like twitter especially, became means whereby people could communicate as part of making the arab spring, and they were also forms of media by which people could communicate to explain the arab spring. And so, in that sense, the Global Village that mcluhan talked about was able to create a kind of consciousness of some of those political feelings. Theres no doubt that social media was able to create an alternative conversation outside of the official channels of communication, the traditional mass media. Another strange effect of this. Electric environment. Is the total absence of secrecy. No form of secrecy is possible at electric speed. At electric speed, everything becomes xray. With the end of secrecy goes the end of monopolies of knowledge there can no longer be a monopoly of knowledge in learning, education. Or in power. The wikileaks example actually quite good to understand the decline of the monopoly of knowledge; and in the age of electronic media, or in the age of the social media, we can actually access the information by ourselves and the resources are not really limited and not mainly collated by the government or Corporate Media industries. So wikileaks example shows how we can build up our own Public Opinion in terms of collective intelligence. The way in which technology has provided access to so much more information has thrown into sharp relief the tension between the idea of transparency that we all think is a great thing and the idea of privacy, which we also all think is a great thing, and if you look, for example, at the wikileaks story, there you could see that those two coming into conflict in a very stark sort of way, with diplomats saying, we simply cant carry on with our work if its going to be in danger of being made public, really at any time in the future. The leaked cables could have a huge impact on hotspots like iran, north korea, pakistan. And yet the argument for transparency we should know what our governments are doing is a strong one as well. So i think that mcluhans idea of information being much. More ubiquitous has certainly come to pass. So this new form of knowledge production and information construction is challenging the monopoly of knowledge which is based on the nations take or certain media industries, so it really shows the democratization of knowledge and information. Yes, were retribalizing. Mcluhan would find a way of surprising us in talking about todays media. Involuntarily, were getting rid of individualism. Were in a process of making a tribe. He would continue to make come up with weird little aphorisms that are kind of sexy and interesting and they make you think and you wanna know what they mean, but theyre very hard to interpret and the minute we held him down and said, now, come on, marshall, what does this really mean . He would back off and say, oh, youve misinterpreted me. Youve misunderstood me. Its the flip, its the obverse, its the other side, its the other way, so he would be a trickster. He would be a fun person to have on the listening post, but what he actually meant and what he would say, fortunately, is beyond me. The stream is uniquely interactive television. In fact, we depend on you, your ideas, your concerns. All these folks are making a whole lot of money. You are one of the voices of this show. I think youve offended everyone with that kathy. Hold on, theres some room to offend people, im here. We have a right to know whats in our food and monsanto do not have the right to hide it from us. So join the conversation and make it your own. Watch the stream. And join the conversation online ajamstream. From our headquarters in new york, here are the headlines this hour. Al Jazeera America is the only news channel that brings you live news at the top of every hour. A deal in the senate may be at hand and just in the nick of time. Thousands of new yorkers are marching in solidarity. Were following multiple developments on syria at this hour. Every hour from reporters stationed around the world and across the country. Only on al Jazeera America. Consider this the news of the day plus so much more. We begin with the government shutdown. Answers to the questions no one else will ask. It seems like they cant agree to anything in washington no matter what. Antonio mora, Award Winning and hard hitting. Weve heard you talk about the history of suicide in your family. Theres no status quo, just the bottom line. But, what about buying shares in a professional athlete . Weve just been talking about a man who was writing back in the 1960s and 70s about an Information Age only just emerging. Today, in the midst of the digital revolution, new technologies have been heralded as the advent of a new and promising era. That has also prompted critics. Writer and thinker Evgeny Morozov is one of them. He has eloquently warned against celebrating the internet as a panacea for censorship and the control of information, a pipeline that can change our approach to everything from policy making to governance. Hes written two books on the subject the net delusion in 2011 and his latest, to save everything click here. I sat down with the Evgeny Morozov to talk about Marshall Mcluhan, the new digital era in which we live and what we should not expect it to deliver. Evgeny morozov, welcome to the listening post. Good to be here. Weve just done that piece on Marshall Mcluhan and, in your book, you have a term mcluhanism that you attach to people in not an entirely complimentary way. Mhmm. Based on the way they see modern technology, social media, new media. Why the term . Why the pejorative aspect . Well, i think there was clearly a lot of depths to some of mcluhans work and i enjoy a lot of it myself, but his interpretation by his later forewords is to me somewhat vulgar and the way in which they start comparing different technologies and different media, as if they were playing some kind of pingpong lets compare television to radio; lets compare radio to newspapers; lets compare newspapers to the internet to me, it doesnt sound very useful, in part because the internet means so many different things, it embodies so many different logics. The way in which facebook works differs from the way in which instapaper works. The way in which instapaper works differs from the way amazon works. So once we start collapsing all of those different logics that these Companies Operate on under this one umbrella term called the internet and then we start comparing with, say, television, i think it creates too many ambiguities and it actually makes it harder for us to understand the logics on which many of those technologies run. On mcluhan, did his coinage of that term, the Global Village not accurately foresee the age, in certain respects, in which we live today . Well, i dont think that that was a very useful term because it distracted us from understanding a lot more evil forces like nationalism that prevented us from getting to Global Village, but there was clearly, you know, some kind of a longing for establishing those bridges between idaho and india and the idea was that new media, like television, would allow us to establish those bridges, even though there was very little shared cultural contacts or perhaps even desire to communicate. So in that sense, you know, i do buy into the cosmopolitan project in the sense that we probably want people to think a little bit broader, just think more about world outside of their immediate neighbourhood, but i dont think that such connections happen just by giving people the tools with which to communicate, and this is why i think so many people are disappointed with the fact that, given facebook, given twitter and given mobile phones, skype, you still dont see people from idaho having much interest in people in india. It doesnt just happen overnight by giving people the tools and mcluhan in this sense was very toolcentric. When you use the term the internet are you mentally putting it in scare quotes . Because in your book, thats what you do. Every time, its those two quotation marks around the internet. Whats your problem with the term that you just used . What im trying to do by putting the internet in quotation marks is to make people understand that what they mean by the internet might differ from what i mean by the internet and what you mean by the internet. I do think that its some kind of religion. Its people invoking the internet in places where they need to go and invoke logic and good arguments. They just bring up an argument that says, well, the internet wouldnt accept that, or this goes against the grain of the internet. Well, where is that grain . Ive never seen it and im not sure it exists, so by putting it in scary quotes, i think im trying to make people aware of just how fluid this concept is and how sensitive we need to be whenever its invoked in public debate. In the arab world, you talk a little bit about the revolutions and you talk about this technology being much better at starting uprisings, that people describe as revolutions, but you again draw the distinction, saying that this technology is a lot better at starting the uprising than it is at completing the revolution. What do you mean by that . The reason why we tend to think that social media is playing such an Important Role is, again, because we are focusing only on its power to decentralize, right . And its power to spread communication across many different subgroups and many different, you know, pockets of resistance; and once the time comes to actually engage in organized political struggle, against already well organized [unsure of word] like the Muslim Brotherhood in egypt, for example, or like the egyptian army, which were more or less [unsure of word], that had very well disciplined communication mechanism, so what happened in egypt, i think, is that a lot of this young, often secular, often even occasionally [inaudible] young people, couldnt speak in one organized voice and they discovered that they havent invested enough money and enough energy and enough effort into building the kind of structures that would be resilient enough but would also be centralized enough to be able to counter what was already being set up in opposition by the Muslim Brotherhood. A lot of people had a lot of learning to do during those arab spring revolutions. The activists learned a lot. The mainstream news media had to learn how to use the video, how to verify, whether to trust it or not, and governments had to learn how to deal with it. Looking at the government side and whats happening in syria today and the fact that this revolution seems to have been thwarted, or at least put on pause, at a stage that the others managed to progress through fairly rapidly, what does that tell you about what the Syrian Government learned as it went to school on those other countries . Well, i think the Syrian Government was, from the very beginning, much smarter than the Egyptian Government and so. Smarter or just more ruthless . Well, i mean, one doesnt exclude the other, so, i mean, they were clearly more ruthless as well but they were smarter when it came to new media. They were, from the very beginning, setting up their own units like the Syrian Electronic Army that could go and hack the emails and hack the websites of the opponents of the regime. They were clearly investing in all sorts of targeted censorship technologies and then theres all sorts of targeted surveillance technologies that allowed them to monitor internet traffic in ways that are far more sophisticated than what was, we were saying, on the ground in egypt. So they did have some early information advantage and i think, as the conflict progressed towards outright civil war, of course there is less and less of a role that the internet could play. What do you make of the way Mainstream Media deals with this new content, initially from north africa, more recently in syria, material that is very difficult to authenticate . How would you rate the performance of the Mainstream Media in dealing with that information, that data . Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, i think its getting better. I remember when i first started writing about citizen journalism, it was during the war between russia and georgia in 2008, and back then, you know, there were lots of pictures that were coming from [inaudible] in that case, and we just didnt know. Where they came from and you just know that you cannot rely on people on the ground to go and do the reporting when the electricity is down because they cannot charge their iphones, you know . So you can give iphones to everyone on the ground in [inaudible] but you cannot expect them to do the job the professional journalists ought to be doing, in part because you want professional journalists on the ground because you trust them to go and do all of the necessary intelligence work and all of the necessary ethical work that requires, you know, a lot of thinking and a lot of resources. So its not a new. Its not, you know, i dont see new challenges but the, sort of the longevity of the conflict and the fact that there are more people present in social media, i think, has increased the level of scrutiny that media need to exercise. vo al Jazeera America we understand that every news story begins and ends with people. The efforts are focused on rescuing stranded residents. vo we pursue that story beyond the headline, past the spokesperson, to the streets. Thousands of riot Police Deployed across the capitol. vo we put all of our Global Resources behind every story. It is a scene of utter devastation. vo and follow it no matter where it leads, all the way to you. Al Jazeera America. Take a new look at news. And now, a techknow minute. Start with one issue education. Gun control. The gap between rich and poor. Job creation. Climate change. Tax policy. The economy. Iran. Healthcare. Ad guests on all sides of the debate. This is a right we should all have. Its just the way it is. Theres something seriously wrong. Theres been acrimony. The conservative ideal. Its an urgent need. And a host willing to ask the tough questions how do you explain it to yourself . And youll get. The inside story ray suarez hosts inside story weekdays at 5 eastern only on al Jazeera America youre definitely swimming against the current on a lot of this new media stuff and im wondering whether there are people out there who just think that youre a grump, whether this is a marketing exercise, perhaps, by you because there are eyeballs to be had on that side of the argument. Im just, you must have heard some interesting counter arguments from Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Sure. Give us a few of those. Im sure there are people are making that point, but ill leave it up to them to make that argument. Im not gonna make an argument against myself. But, i mean, someone must have called you, like, the antichrist or Something Like that. Yeah, i get that all the time, but again i think people who are in Silicon Valley clearly dont find my message very encouraging because it does lead toward [inaudible] and i made the very strategic decision to put some extra effort into having my monthly column syndicated in the european newspapers, because i know that europe is the only place where Silicon Valley is regulated, so i get much more attraction whenever my column appears in italy or germany than when it appears in the us, in part because the debate in america is lost. Noone is gonna regulate google and facebook there, so the battlefields have moved elsewhere and i moved along with the battlefields. One of the real premises of your book is this whole notion of solutionism and solutionists, again a term that, i would say, you use pejoratively. Mhmm. This notion that we can solve a lot of things. Mhmm. Through this technology. Mhmm. Whats your problem with that . Well, my problem with that is that not everything counts as a problem that is worth solving. Very often, Silicon Valley defines problems as problems based solely on the fact that they have nice clean Digital Solutions available for fixing them. When you listen to google, when you listen to facebook, when you listen to Mark Zuckerberg or eric schmidt, they very explicitly say that we dont think of ourselves as conventional companies. We do not wake up to make money, which is almost the exact quote from facebooks ipo letter, and they say that we do want to take on this task of saving some of the worlds greatest problems and solving them. So youre saying that they should just call it what it is, that they should just call it, you know, a commercial enterprise as opposed to some kind of social. Well, i think when they position themselves as being in the social humanitarian business, you feel as if youre contributing to changing the world and not doing the opposite, which is how Silicon Valley likes to think of wall street, so there are arguments that theyre making, but im also arguing that policymakers need to be very suspicious of the bridges that Silicon Valley offers them to problem solving and its this interaction between policymakers on the one hand and Silicon Valley on the other hand that most of my arguments against solutions function. Let me just try one more thing on you and that has to do with cultural differences. Mhmm. Youre someone who comes from. Mhmm. Bielorussia. Yes. Which used to be part of the soviet union. I spent a fair amount of time reporting from there, i picked up a few pessimistic, some even fatalistic traits on the part of people who come from that part of the world. You also told me you spent some time in the balkans. Sure. As well and now youre. Then you went to sunny western united states, northern california, land of optimism, land of solutionism, uhhuh. The view you take on this Technology May well be valid, but i do sense a trace of cultural difference and i think. Sure. Poor Evgeny Morozov, slightly pessimistic. Uhhuh. Quasi russian guy, sitting in the worlds most optimistic country, it must be tough on you. No, im enjoying my sort of outsider status. There is some kind of a pessimism that does come from the time i spent in the balkans and the time i spent in, you know, belarus, whereby i do think that the life improvements that Silicon Valley wants to bring, even if they do end up working, which i dont doubt that they will, they will just remove the kind of friction and the kind of conflict and the kind of inefficiency that actually make our lives worth living and they make us, you know, strive towards something and if everything is working, im just not sure what there is to strive towards and i think this is. Or write about. Exactly, and i think this is the kind of insight that a lot of people in Silicon Valley, in the pursuit of utopian projects, they just fail to realize. Evgeny morozov, author of to save everything click here, thanks for speaking to us here at the listening post. Thanks for having me. Youve been watching a special edition of our program. Next week, were back to our usual format, examining the global media, old and new. Well see you then here at the listening post. Stening post. Welcome to al Jazeera America. Im jonathan betz. Here are the stories we are following tonight talks in geneva Irans Nuclear program are going well into the night. There is no word whether key issues have been resolved. These are live pictures. Rebels in syria control the largest oil field. It could mean the government is cut off from all crude reserves. China ups the antiin the ireland sea. It could lead to violence. 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