Mcluhan, Social Media and Ethics Dr

Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020) Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net McLuhan, Social Media and Ethics Dr. Thomas Cooper—Visual and Media Arts, Emerson College—[email protected] The insights of Marshall and Eric McLuhan are of perennial interest, and the observation that media affects the human psyche are of permanent relevance. The McLuhan’s Laws of Media are applied as probes to the contemporary digital scene as a creative pedagogy, catalyzing insight. Then, the implications of new media upon journalism are laid out, along with their incumbent ethical con- siderations. Presearch, or well-funded preventative research, is offered as an approach toward ameliorating the worst effects of accelerated electric communication. Introduction For many years the field of “media ethics” primarily pertained to traditional media such as television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and film. Although it also considered processes such as advertising, public relations, and marketing, the primary process it considered was journalism. Similarly, since Marshall McLuhan’s primary probes and publications about the media emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, he too primarily considered these same media and processes above although he expanded the term “media” to include clocks, weapons, and other technologies which made us think outside the box. However, in the 1980’s and 1990’s following McLuhan’s death we saw an unprecedented realm of technological transformation. The Internet, the World Wide Web, smart satellites, 360-degree cameras, and intelligent agents—forced us to think differently about media ethics and in applying McLuhan’s thought. In media ethics, the new technologies not only poured the old ethical issues—privacy, deception, obscenity, etc.—into new bottles, but each new medium also created a new vocabulary and inventory of ethical issues as well—issues such as flaming, Trojan horses, spam, ransomware and cyber-bullying. Since I had been a graduate assistant to Marshall McLuhan in Canada for seven years during the 70s, it was natural that after Marshall died, colleagues would ask me and other McLuhan associates: “So what do you think McLuhan would think” of each new medium—whether it was TiVo, iPhones, twitter, or “Alexa”—when they first emerged in the marketplace. Yet others sought to apply McLuhan’s thought to the emerging digital world as well. Indeed, Wired magazine named McLuhan as their “patron saint.” 48 McLuhan, Social Media and Ethics As more people revisited McLuhan, some asked “Isn’t the World Wide Web the best case yet for confirming McLuhan’s notion of a “global village?” Nothing about this retrofitting of McLuhan surprised his former staff because McLuhan was fascinated with each new medium and its impact upon both our senses and our society. Understanding Ethics-cum-McLuhan Of all the well-known media scholars on record, probably Marshall McLuhan and his fellow Canadian catalyst Harold Innis most advocated a theory in which media played a dominant role in shaping culture. In his unique version of media history, (McLuhan 1964) claimed that each medium had a major impact upon our psyches, cultures, and institutions, and thus media were a major causal factor in the shaping of society, culture and history. What interested me as a media ethicist was that, if one follows this logic, could not one also claim that each medium had a strong impact upon our ethical landscape as well? For example, by 2007 I had compiled a super-study of all the primary surveys of the American people about media (Babbili, Christians, and Cooper 2008). The study had shown that in the aggregate, U.S. citizens thought that privacy was the third most important media ethics issue facing their lives. A large part of that concern focused on Internet privacy including concerns about cookies, spyware, on-line banking, and identity theft. If you further investigate those studies amalgamated into a super-study, you would find that the Internet had indeed imported other ethical issues—not just privacy—into our worldwide range of concerns—issues such as children’s access to pornography, cyberfraud, and on-line junkmail, which we learned to call spam. Such observations allowed ethicists to use McLuhan’s thinking not just in obvious ways, such as to agree that new social media are enablers and subsets of a “global village,” but also to ask to what extent “the medium is the message” when it comes to ethical issues. Not only could one apply McLuhan’s best-known earlier ideas to media ethics, but one could also experiment with his later thinking as well. It is his later obsession with what he called the “laws of the media” or the “tetrad” in the 1970s, which I wish to apply to the social media and journalism ethics of today. McLuhan’s Laws of Media Ten years following McLuhan’s death, Marshall’s son Eric published the book Laws of Media: The New Science (McLuhan, M & E. McLuhan1988). In another posthumous McLuhan book, again co-authored by father and son: Media and Formal Cause (McLuhan, M & E. McLuhan 2011), other fresh insights about the “laws” of the media appeared. For me these are not laws which offer the exactitude of say Newton’s and Boyle’s measurable natural laws, nor the precision and implementation of Supreme Court rulings, but rather McLuhan’s “laws” for me, are novel probing tools which help us rethink media impact from a unique angle of observation. 49 Dr. Thomas Cooper As developed by father and son, Marshall and Eric, the four laws indicate that each new medium 1) amplifies, enlarges, or enhances a phenomenon or medium which already exists; 2) retrieves or brings back a previous phenomenon or medium; 3) obsolesces, marginalizes, or downsizes some other existing phenomenon or medium, and 4) when it is pressed to an extreme, it flips or reverses into a new phenomenon or medium, even into its own opposite. (see McLuhan, M. and E. McLuhan, 2011, 141). So, in case you are not conversant with these “laws” let’s take the automobile as a simple McLuhanesque illustration to apply his tetrad (a four step, self-contained process). First, the automobile amplifies or enhances the foot or the bicycle. Second, given the suit of metal protection that the automobile provides, it retrieves or brings back the knight in shining armor. Third the automobile obsolesces the horse and buggy and finally it “flips” or reverses into the gridlock traffic jam which may some day obsolesce the automobile. Applying the Laws to Media Ethics Let’s choose an example drawn from media ethics so you can see how this would apply in my field and indeed to our topic de jour, social media and journalism. I’m sure you can see the implications for those fields as I apply the tetrad to the ethics of the Internet. First the Internet enhances or amplifies all major previous media ethics issues such as privacy, deception, and defamation of character. Next it obsolesces distance and locale such that these same ethical issues—defamation, deception, and privacy—can occur thousands of miles away. We give new names to these issues when they occur in the land without distance and locale which we call cyberspace—and we now call these issues hacking, flaming, cyberfraud, phishing, etc. Next the Internet quite literally retrieved the Trojan Horse which means it also brought back the hidden underbelly of undetected cookies, viruses, Y2K fears, and spyware. Finally, it flipped into pro-social communities and websites such as EPIC, E-Harmony, Facebook, and Instagram, which create policies to temper the “wild west” Trojan ethic. The Social Media and McLuhan’s Tetrad So, what about the social media themselves. Why not construct a tetrad around Facebook, or Match.com or the Twitter universe? What might McLuhan say are the “laws” of these social media? The social media of Twitter, listservs, YouTube, Facebook, etc. certainly, retrieves the tribe and many of the mores of tribal communication. Tinder, E-Harmony, and Facebook amplify the high school yearbook culture of snapshot attraction and both the extended family and the teleconferencing community. Social media, like COVID-19 social distancing, obsolesce or marginalize the world of face-to-face communication. They exist within a culture in which children now spend twice as much time with machines as with their parents and in which media are increasingly a substitute for marriage and associated with divorce. For example, divorce lawyers note that an increasing number of divorce candidates have substituted on-line pornography for sexual intimacy in a marriage. Such 50 McLuhan, Social Media and Ethics lawyers and sociologists often cite the divorce candidate’s preference for media (whether sports, news, pornography, Facebook, or other social media) to spending time with their partner as an increasing factor in divorce. Finally, social media overload flips or reverses into the world of “back to nature,” media diets, digital detox, quitting Facebook, an increasing migration to live with the Plain People such as the Amish. My book, Fast Media/Media Fast (2011, Gaeta Press) describes this reversal or reaction away from media saturation. By now you may support my supposition that McLuhan’s “laws” of the media are more of a creative pedagogy for mining new insights than a system of precise jurisprudence or natural law. So, let’s consider how they might be applied to journalism ethics within the social media paradigm. Journalism, Social Media, and McLuhan If we look at some of the implications of social media’s impact upon journalism from a McLuhanesque probing perspective, we find that: 1) Tribal journalism and even omni-journalism in which anyone can be a reporter or photographer of a news event by which the tribe may quickly post and distribute what they consider news.

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