It’s a good thing for those of us who live in liberty that the world’s epoch-defining struggle for freedom ended in 1945, and not in 2021. Quite apart from the now-mandatory show-spoiling emissions limits that would have stopped a decent military dust-up in its tracks, how would we wage real, merciless war when the troops are all on Instagram, or TikTok? Learning German phases, being multicultural, New Age? #D-Daylandings trending?
But the bigger reason the boring old Allies would have come short in 2021 is that if current social media trends were followed, misanthropes such as Hitler and Mussolini would have been internet sensations, amassing huge followings for the toxic stew of conspiracy, heresy and self-aggrandising rebelliousness that drives the internet. Hitler’s ability to expose the raw nerve of self-interested prejudice, his manufacture of an artificial yet galvanising outrage, and his sheer unpredictability and caprice, would have triggered an internet tsunami. #the-fuhrer would have been unstoppable, one fears. And Mussolini’s Twitter account wouldn’t have been far behind. #Il-Duce might have featured dodgy observations like the one he once made, apparently, as in: Folded arms emoji ... It’s good to trust others but not to do so is much better ... chest out emoji.
With such rabid and compelling Twitter accounts at their fingertips, the outsize tyrants of history might have been an overwhelming force, assuaging their personal psychoses and anxieties through division and destruction, much like morons of today who’ve been let loose on smartphones. They’d do less damage at the wheel of a Sherman tank.
Instead of liberating people and furnishing their minds with the information needed to make rational decisions, the electronic massification and, ironically, democratisation of media, have had exactly the opposite effect.
Poor old democracy, with its understated idiom, its embrace of due process, its emphasis on empirical data and recognised civilised norms, its once-every-five-years flurry of excitement at election time, would be no match. After all, only a rare being would gaze upon a serene pool of water when he has a fire to watch, enticed by the compelling plasma-lick of destruction, its hint of apocalypse. Democracy in 2021 calls to mind the parson who once lamented the lack of enthusiasm for singing hymns in his church, saying, why does the Devil have all the good tunes? Vanilla-flavoured democracy has become a hard sell.
It’s a grim reflection that social media and internet, which could have spread knowledge and enlightenment, now threaten to pull the world backwards onto the thin ice of partisanship and social conflict, into the malignant and murky waters of superstition, conspiracy and doomsdayism. Ignorance, really, parading as informed, muscular opinion, except that the opinion is an oversized obelisk teetering on the needle of a single misunderstood and misconstrued fact.
Instead of liberating people and furnishing their minds with the information needed to make rational decisions, the electronic massification and, ironically, democratisation of media, have had exactly the opposite effect. And with the subsequent dumbing-down of the world’s voting populations, and the careless internet cheering for tyrants and charlatans, there has been another parallel development. This finds expression in an annoying know-it-all tendency. Social media has given people enough facts to mount an argument at the braai on Sunday, but without the context to allow them to see they’re making idiots of themselves. And burning the boerie while they bend your ear.
Mainstream media, they’re the problem, one is told by these hapless creatures of algorithm.
Whenever I hear this I think of the hundreds of journalist colleagues killed in the line of duty around the world each year. These heroes of truth are among all those vilified. I have never known a journalist who lied, deliberately and with intent, in a story. Hyperbole? Definitely, but lie, not. Get it wrong? OK, we did once have a poor bugger, a visiting Englishman in the newsroom, who made up the words of a judge in court, which seemed outrageous and unforgivable until he explained that he didn’t understand a word of Afrikaans.
If only bad news sells, does it necessarily follow that the health of the media is in inverse proportion to the welfare of society?
Much of this came to mind in watching the Vladimir Putin-powered TV outfit Russia Today, featuring a thinly-veiled propaganda insert about the “collapse of the US empire”. This collapse, and it’s coming soon we’re told, will be along the lines of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Maybe, but only in the same way that a wildebeest resembles a Shetland pony.
And it was not so much, Russia Today said, that the American people had lost faith in their system of government. No, it was worse, much worse: they’d lost interest. Quoting a comScore report, which measures the audiences of the major news networks, the presenters showed how CNN and the other purveyors had nosedived since the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.
And reading up about this phenomenon, it seems the four years of plenty that were the Donald Trump presidency have given way to four years of stultifying boredom. Without Trump, who’s still rigging stuff and destroying people’s futures behind the scenes, and cheating at golf and driving a cart on the greens, politics in the US has become boring. Trump predicted this in 2017, so we’re quite lucky he’s banned on social media or he’d be making A BIG DEAL!!!! about it. Apparently, boring old Joe Biden has fallen off the edge of the media universe, his gaffes making for good TikTok fodder at best. You don’t get on TV just for doing your job.
How then is democracy meant to work, complete with informed electorate making wise choices, in an era where barely disguised ignorance and prejudice, propped up by selective facts, dominate the social media zeitgeist?
How does conventional media, hemmed in by pesky stuff such as fact-checking and the law, not to mention middle-class decorum, even survive in this pool of sharks? How do we overcome this crisis of relevance? If only bad news sells, does it necessarily follow that the health of the media is in inverse proportion to the welfare of society? No-one has the answers, but I know of one newspaper editor who tried to drive circulation, I think, by having his picture carried in the paper, often. So you’d feast on his beatific countenance on page one (handing over some prize or other), then you’d get him on page three as well. Whether it worked I’m not sure, but I don’t see why not.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. So, some years ago on the golf course, a veteran sports scribe who wears a well-travelled anorak and wields a handy niblick told me the secret of getting your internet piece to the top of the reader ratings. It’s simple, he said. Doesn’t matter what you’re writing about, be sure to include the names Sachin Tendulkar and Manny Pacquiao. So that’s what I’ve done. And, if it helps, Julius Malema, Jacob Zuma, Ace Magashule ...
But why stop there? I’m even thinking of asking Babes Wodumo if I can use her name for my byline.
Sunday Times Daily
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