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| Has the Netflix effect created a global village or turned us into narcissists? | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| You can’t talk about any kind of media – any kind of technology – without talking about Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian intellectual who rivalled Warhol or Lennon or the acid guru Timothy Leary for notoriety in the 1960s. His career began in the early 1950s, but it took off in 1962 with his publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, closely followed by the extraordinary Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he introduced his most famous maxim, “the medium is the message”. | You can’t talk about any kind of media – any kind of technology – without talking about Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian intellectual who rivalled Warhol or Lennon or the acid guru Timothy Leary for notoriety in the 1960s. His career began in the early 1950s, but it took off in 1962 with his publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, closely followed by the extraordinary Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he introduced his most famous maxim, “the medium is the message”. |
| McLuhan’s writing was dense with allusion and metaphor: he quoted freely from Shakespeare, Joyce and Yeats (“the visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream”), and was in no way afraid of ambiguity. Yet within this tapestry of ideas was something so elegant and elastic that it walks a path from then to now with ease – a unified theory of media that describes our relationship to its technologies in a single phrase; the E=mc2 of the information age. The medium is the message. | McLuhan’s writing was dense with allusion and metaphor: he quoted freely from Shakespeare, Joyce and Yeats (“the visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world is no longer a dream”), and was in no way afraid of ambiguity. Yet within this tapestry of ideas was something so elegant and elastic that it walks a path from then to now with ease – a unified theory of media that describes our relationship to its technologies in a single phrase; the E=mc2 of the information age. The medium is the message. |
| McLuhan starts with a simple thought, then spirals outward in surprising ways. His imaginative leap involved seeing the media we create as “extensions of ourselves”, whose primary importance is to change not what we know, but our relationship to the world and the processes by which we act upon it; how we think, behave, dream and connect with other people. The medium is its own message, enabling and constraining in and of itself. “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us,” he said. | McLuhan starts with a simple thought, then spirals outward in surprising ways. His imaginative leap involved seeing the media we create as “extensions of ourselves”, whose primary importance is to change not what we know, but our relationship to the world and the processes by which we act upon it; how we think, behave, dream and connect with other people. The medium is its own message, enabling and constraining in and of itself. “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us,” he said. |
| Through the hallucinatory fug of 2016 I’ve been thinking a lot about McLuhan – and never more than in the past fortnight, when the confluence of two apparently unrelated events suddenly struck me as significant. First a candidate for the American presidency threatened to repudiate an election result if he lost, opening a path to civil disobedience or violence on the part of his followers. I’m working in Los Angeles at the moment, and hearing this reminded me of the way two separate Americans recently offered sympathy for my having to live under sharia law in the UK, commiserating with the way Birmingham is now off-limits to all but Islamic State members and Jason Statham. When I told them that, unless this had occurred in the fortnight since I’d left, it wasn’t true, they looked me coolly in the eye and insisted it was – that I, who live in the UK, was mistaken. | Through the hallucinatory fug of 2016 I’ve been thinking a lot about McLuhan – and never more than in the past fortnight, when the confluence of two apparently unrelated events suddenly struck me as significant. First a candidate for the American presidency threatened to repudiate an election result if he lost, opening a path to civil disobedience or violence on the part of his followers. I’m working in Los Angeles at the moment, and hearing this reminded me of the way two separate Americans recently offered sympathy for my having to live under sharia law in the UK, commiserating with the way Birmingham is now off-limits to all but Islamic State members and Jason Statham. When I told them that, unless this had occurred in the fortnight since I’d left, it wasn’t true, they looked me coolly in the eye and insisted it was – that I, who live in the UK, was mistaken. |
| How on earth to make sense of this? Gentle probing revealed these people’s information to have come from Fox News and websites such as Breitbart, the same sources from which Trump’s world-view is cobbled together – news outlets neither I nor anyone I would trust to make my skinny soy decaf mochaccino with Peruvian cinnamon, or even to own a gun, ever sees. | How on earth to make sense of this? Gentle probing revealed these people’s information to have come from Fox News and websites such as Breitbart, the same sources from which Trump’s world-view is cobbled together – news outlets neither I nor anyone I would trust to make my skinny soy decaf mochaccino with Peruvian cinnamon, or even to own a gun, ever sees. |
| Then I heard news that Netflix, the US-based streaming network known for House of Cards and Orange is the New Black had rocked the stock market by announcing a huge and unexpected jump in subscribers during the third quarter of this year – 3.2m of these new subscribers were outside the US, many in Britain. At the end of 2015 5m UK households paid for Netflix, a figure projected to double by 2020. The company’s constituency is disproportionately young and upscale, according to the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board. | Then I heard news that Netflix, the US-based streaming network known for House of Cards and Orange is the New Black had rocked the stock market by announcing a huge and unexpected jump in subscribers during the third quarter of this year – 3.2m of these new subscribers were outside the US, many in Britain. At the end of 2015 5m UK households paid for Netflix, a figure projected to double by 2020. The company’s constituency is disproportionately young and upscale, according to the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board. |
| Praise be to Don (Draper), I thought. When in the US, shows by Netflix and competitors such as HBO, Amazon, AMC and Hulu are now all I watch; in the UK almost all, as even the BBC’s willingness to take risks falls to a fragmenting audience, political pressure and the concomitant obsession with bums on seats. And this is good, n’est-ce pas? People whose education/outlook/experience disposes them to look for surprise and originality in their media have a place to go. People who want the comfort of predictability have their places, too. On a personal level, how could anyone lament a situation held to have brought a “golden age” of TV drama and panoply of diverse news sources, in which everyone gets exactly what they want? | Praise be to Don (Draper), I thought. When in the US, shows by Netflix and competitors such as HBO, Amazon, AMC and Hulu are now all I watch; in the UK almost all, as even the BBC’s willingness to take risks falls to a fragmenting audience, political pressure and the concomitant obsession with bums on seats. And this is good, n’est-ce pas? People whose education/outlook/experience disposes them to look for surprise and originality in their media have a place to go. People who want the comfort of predictability have their places, too. On a personal level, how could anyone lament a situation held to have brought a “golden age” of TV drama and panoply of diverse news sources, in which everyone gets exactly what they want? |
| Pan back and the picture looks more complex. McLuhan began as an enthusiast for the “new electronic interdependence” he saw TV and (subsequently) the internet creating. The “global village”, he promised, would mimic the intimacy and sense of community surrendered to the alienations of the mechanical age, until “‘time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished” and we live in a “simultaneous happening”. With broadcast TV, there was a case for this: early satellite pictures of the notorious Tet offensive are claimed to have turned public opinion against the Vietnam war in 1968, and the first moon landing a year later could not have made the impact it did but for TV. | Pan back and the picture looks more complex. McLuhan began as an enthusiast for the “new electronic interdependence” he saw TV and (subsequently) the internet creating. The “global village”, he promised, would mimic the intimacy and sense of community surrendered to the alienations of the mechanical age, until “‘time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished” and we live in a “simultaneous happening”. With broadcast TV, there was a case for this: early satellite pictures of the notorious Tet offensive are claimed to have turned public opinion against the Vietnam war in 1968, and the first moon landing a year later could not have made the impact it did but for TV. |
| Citizens had to share the same few networks, tolerating others’ programmes and uniting regularly over favourites, be it Morecambe and Wise or Top of the Pops, which though usually crap, almost everyone watched together. Occasionally viewers would be surprised by programmes they didn’t think they would like, establishing fresh connections in the brain and with other people. | Citizens had to share the same few networks, tolerating others’ programmes and uniting regularly over favourites, be it Morecambe and Wise or Top of the Pops, which though usually crap, almost everyone watched together. Occasionally viewers would be surprised by programmes they didn’t think they would like, establishing fresh connections in the brain and with other people. |
| The quality and breadth of what we watch in 2016 is infinitely better, but the big picture experience might not be. We’re becoming strangers to one another, and with hindsight this isn’t surprising. When uptake of the pre-web internet began in the late 1980s, the global pooling of information – and wisdom – was much trumpeted. But if you talk to early adopters, most will say the net’s real wonder was in allowing them to commune with like-minded people everywhere, unfettered by geography. | The quality and breadth of what we watch in 2016 is infinitely better, but the big picture experience might not be. We’re becoming strangers to one another, and with hindsight this isn’t surprising. When uptake of the pre-web internet began in the late 1980s, the global pooling of information – and wisdom – was much trumpeted. But if you talk to early adopters, most will say the net’s real wonder was in allowing them to commune with like-minded people everywhere, unfettered by geography. |
| If you were an avant-garde jazz fan in Billericay, now you could find other fans to talk to, until before long you had your own virtual “community”. And unlike a physical space, you never had to leave this one, never had to interact with anyone you didn’t want to. Twenty-five years later, net algorithms will feed you material based entirely on your past, with no notion of a potential future; of growth or challenge. We’re all being reinforced, all the time, and it feels good – until we find ourselves on the sharp side of a Brexit vote. | If you were an avant-garde jazz fan in Billericay, now you could find other fans to talk to, until before long you had your own virtual “community”. And unlike a physical space, you never had to leave this one, never had to interact with anyone you didn’t want to. Twenty-five years later, net algorithms will feed you material based entirely on your past, with no notion of a potential future; of growth or challenge. We’re all being reinforced, all the time, and it feels good – until we find ourselves on the sharp side of a Brexit vote. |
| There seems little doubt that over two and a half decades, this atomisation has changed us – the medium has been the message – helping to create an environment in which superficially confounding phenomena such as Brexit and Donald Trump and the measurable rise of narcissism are perfectly logical, if not inevitable. Indeed, the provocative documentarian Adam Curtis goes one step further, suggesting in his new film HyperNormalisation that the new technology, far from having caused the fragmentation we see and feel, merely amplified a model of “radical individualism” that had been evolving since the late 1960s and is now dominant. In this model – an understandable reaction to the misuse of power by leaders in the 50s and 60s – truth to self becomes the ultimate and only truth, with self-expression its conveyor and personal preference the lone arbiter. | There seems little doubt that over two and a half decades, this atomisation has changed us – the medium has been the message – helping to create an environment in which superficially confounding phenomena such as Brexit and Donald Trump and the measurable rise of narcissism are perfectly logical, if not inevitable. Indeed, the provocative documentarian Adam Curtis goes one step further, suggesting in his new film HyperNormalisation that the new technology, far from having caused the fragmentation we see and feel, merely amplified a model of “radical individualism” that had been evolving since the late 1960s and is now dominant. In this model – an understandable reaction to the misuse of power by leaders in the 50s and 60s – truth to self becomes the ultimate and only truth, with self-expression its conveyor and personal preference the lone arbiter. |
| It’s been said that with new technologies we tend to foresee the positives but be blindsided by the negatives. Can individual choice be a negative? When I set out to write my book Moondust, which involved tracking down the (then) nine surviving men who had walked on the moon, one of my questions was why some had fared well upon returning – spinning off at delightfully surprising tangents – and others not. | It’s been said that with new technologies we tend to foresee the positives but be blindsided by the negatives. Can individual choice be a negative? When I set out to write my book Moondust, which involved tracking down the (then) nine surviving men who had walked on the moon, one of my questions was why some had fared well upon returning – spinning off at delightfully surprising tangents – and others not. |
| In retrospect, it seems to me that those inclined to see their feats not as individual achievements, but as merely the most visible part of a shared collective effort, were more likely to integrate their experiences into productive lives thereafter. So in my opinion, the most empowering, liberating feeling a human can have is that in the scheme of things they’re unimportant, in service to something greater than themselves, with all the constraint to personal choice so entailed. | In retrospect, it seems to me that those inclined to see their feats not as individual achievements, but as merely the most visible part of a shared collective effort, were more likely to integrate their experiences into productive lives thereafter. So in my opinion, the most empowering, liberating feeling a human can have is that in the scheme of things they’re unimportant, in service to something greater than themselves, with all the constraint to personal choice so entailed. |