No one embodies the incoherence of the modern digital age quite like Trump does

[riversedge]

Interesting article. We see this Trump everyday (as described below)--the babbling idiot.

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No one embodies the incoherence of the modern digital age quite like Trump does
12:42 PM - 19 Feb 2019



Feb 18, 2019

Worshipping the Electronic Image

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

Donald Trump, like much of the American public, is entranced by electronic images. He interprets reality through the distortions of digital media. His decisions, opinions, political positions, prejudices and sense of self are reflected back to him on screens. He views himself and the world around him as a vast television show with himself as the star. His primary concerns as president are his ratings, his popularity and his image. He is a creature—maybe the poster child—of the modern, post-literate culture, a culture that critics such as Marshall McLuhan, Daniel Boorstin, James W. Carey and Neil Postman warned us about.

It is not, as some have suggested, merely that Trump speaks at the level of a seventh-grader or that he harkens back to a preliterate oral culture. He embodies the incoherence of the modern digital age, filled with sudden shifts from subject to subject, a roller-coaster ride of emotional highs and lows punctuated with commercials. There is nonstop stimulation. Seldom does anything occupy our attention for more than a few seconds. Nothing has context. Images overwhelm words. We are perpetually confused, but always entertained. We barely remember what we saw or heard a few minutes earlier. This is by design of the elites who manipulate us.

“It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse,” Postman points out. “It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.” Americans, because television stages their world, “no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.” Trump is what is produced when a society severs itself from print, when it pushes art, ethics, classics, philosophy, history and the humanities to the margins of the universities and culture, when its members spend hours sitting inert in front of a screen. Information, ideas and epistemology are, as Postman writes, given form today by electronic images.

It is a mistake to see what is happening as cultural regression. It is worse than that. Oral cultures prized memorization and cultivated the high art of rhetoric. Leaders, playwrights and poets in oral cultures did not speak to their publics in Trump’s crude vernacular. More ominous than the president’s impoverished vocabulary is that he cannot string together sentences that make sense. This replicates not only the shoddy vocabulary of television, but more importantly the incoherence of television. Trump is able to communicate with tens of millions of Americans, also raised in front of screens, because they too have been linguistically and intellectually mutated by digital images. They lack the ability to detect lies or think rationally. They are part of our post-truth culture.......................................................

[sweetroxie]

1. This is sooooo true

[dhill926]

2. K & R to infinity.....

and I fear now that the genie is out of the bottle...there's no going back. Our culture has been denigrated by all this shit. I am fairly tech savvy and not a Luddite...but I despise the Twitterization of our culture...

[SWBTATTReg]

3. An reaction to the digital age and/or bombardment of Americans with the constant onslaught ...

of images non-stop (via commercials etc.). It's not just digital. It is the pure embodiment of predatory capitalism, non-stop 24-7. One positive thing about this trend is that it becomes far more difficult to penetrate and change mindsets and as a result, being that the Russians are attempting their attacks again on us/democratic challengers, this won't have near the impact it did as it did before. That's why commercials (even the good ones) have only a limited shelf life. One hit wonders only come once in a lifetime.

The Russians and other state actors will still try and influence people/voters, and I predict that what will happen is that these attempt(s) will backfire, for they just won't work again.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. Mr. Fish.....of course.

It is interesting to speculate what Trump would have been like if he were born 50 years earlier.
assuming all else being the same ( rich beginnings, etc) would he a demagogue of the radio waves, like Father Coughlin,
or even Huey Long, or like Andy Griffith's character in A Face in the Crowd.

He may be semi-illiterate, but he does have a very good grasp of the power of tv, and that his core audience are tv watchers.

[Blue_Tires]

5. Hedges gets it right for once... Strong piece