Mcluhan, Social Media and Ethics Dr

Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020)

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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.”

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.

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

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. This state retrieves a tribal news mode of multiple messengers and the village news of town criers and village gossips. 2) These changes enhance pseudo-journalism in which people without credentials and professional protocol are texting and tweeting and thus retrieving the medium of the telegram. “Reports” of diminishing accuracy and authenticity multiply including a higher ratio of hoaxes, fake news, unfounded conspiracy theories, hype, single source hearsay, and snippets without context. 3) Thus, the world of piggy-backing is retrieved in which one medium shares a ride on the back of another. For example, a cell-phone video clip first goes viral via piggy-backing on the Internet and then reaches broadcast audiences via piggy-backing on CNN, CBS or CBC news. 4) All of this may lead to a world of Pro-Am (professional and amateur) journalism in which professionals willingly cooperate with amateurs to scoop the competition and enhance their soUrcery—which is Deni Elliott’s word for “inventory of sources”, many of whom are questionable. 5) All of this creates the world of the paradoxical “instant deadline” since the competition is wired to 24/7/365 soUrcery and constant updates. All deadlines are instant since any rival may update a story at any location at any time.

Dr. Thomas Cooper

Implications for Journalism Ethics What does all this mean for journalism ethics pocketed within the bouncing kangaroo pouch of social media? First all journalism ethics issues have been either amplified, retrieved or transformed (or in the digital parlance, we say they have been “morphed”). In 1998 I published a list of 40 cyber-ethics issues (Cooper 1998) and only two years later that list had grown to 52 issues (Cooper 2000). The first list was published in a special issue of The Journal of Mass Media Ethics, co-edited by Clifford Christians, devoted to new media issues. Today, the list could easily reach over 100 issues. In the new wild west, pros and “ams” cross back and forth into each other’s territory without a “passport,” so quality gate-keeping is obsolesced as the worlds of both tribal and village short-cuts are retrieved. Indeed, Kovach’s and Rosensteil’s (1999) book Warp Speed demonstrates that one of the casualties of journalistic cyber-speed-up is ethical reasoning. Journalists increasingly feel they have less time to confer about ethical issues or to seek additional confirming sources or to thoroughly fact check their work. Such short-cuts in the realm of gate-keeping, accuracy, soUrcery, and ethical decision-making mean that issues such as fairness, equal time, truth-telling, non-discrimination, piracy, privacy, defamation, obscenity, censorship, confidentiality, representation, conflict of interest, checkbook journalism, junketeering, sensationalism, and many other traditional issues simply cannot be scrutinized carefully while travelling up the escalator of rapid change. Moreover, what was once called the foreign news bureau is now transformed into the Facebook community in Anchorage or Albania. If we want to know what is occurring there, we ask “friends” living in distant places and we amplify their most interesting YouTube posts and link images as evidence of social crises and causes. All of this pushes us toward “limbo stick” standards. If you recall the limbo dance, the elevation of the stick is lowered each time the dancers go beneath it—and so it is with the standards for on- line journalism. In fact, we might invent a kind of McLuhanesque “law” that accuracy, fact checking, quality source confirmation, fairness, respect for human dignity, etc., all decrease in quality in direct proportion to the number of competitors, brevity of deadlines, number of amateurs, stretched capacity of professionals, and decreased budgets available to journalists.

Since print, television or online journalists must now multi-task to stay competitive, their first casualty is accuracy and the second is personnel issues such as burn-out and frustration which undercuts standards and quality. The “three source” rule of high standards flagship stations is reduced to two sources and even one while pack journalism can become pack civic journalism when social movements are catalysts to on-the-scene documentation. Prior to the Internet there was as fairly standard rule among top journalists that they must seek out three sources for primary facts to insure accuracy. However, the speed-up which

McLuhan, Social Media and Ethics accompanied the Internet often reduced the number of sources to two rather than three—and sometimes only to one. So accuracy became the victim. Moreover, journalism no longer has a single meaning but becomes a collage of pro-am mixed conduits and spheres referenced within an even lower EPA emissions standards zone called the blogosphere. Since endless “hot” stories can spread like brushfire, the news cycle no longer has a beginning nor an end. So, the tribal drum continues beating in all time zones whether via podcasts or texting with or without gatekeepers. What this means is that ethics becomes the caboose, not the engine of change since it is impossible for any global team of ethicists, let alone any one ethicist to track all the innovations and combinations of technology, not to mention their attendant issues which we experience, like the paper cut, after the fact. We tend to discover and study new media ethical issues after the train has left the station rather than in a preventive and holistic way.

Indeed, McLuhan felt this was our somnambulant human condition. We seem seduced or numbed by all media (McLuhan spoke of “narcissus narcosis”) and their impact. The Remedy? McLuhan always claimed that he “aimed to explore, not explain” and thus that he was more like a spelunker than an advocate or evangelist. That said, I have, like McLuhan’s son, Eric, narrated in depth elsewhere how McLuhan’s views were informed by and indeed outered (if not uttered) by his Roman Catholic values. Marshall would no doubt be concerned about a global city over- communicating past the speed of light without depth and comprehension. But McLuhan was not in the business of posing social remedies nor solving ethical dilemmas. However, we ethicists approach all this quite differently. So, I’d like to recommend that while understanding tetrads and laws may offer insight, the only way to truly diminish the onslaught of accelerating ethical issues is through presearch. Presearch is a coined term I am introducing to suggest that we need unlimited preventive research to anticipate the possible effects of emerging media not only upon journalism but upon the global village inside our heads. Corporations invest millions of dollars finding out if there is a market for new technologies. What if similar budgets were invested in exploring what the effects of new technologies might be upon society? Until 1995, the U.S. Congress maintained an Office of Technology Assessment which, like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), helped us understand new products, often before they went on the market. When we investigate new inventions before they are implemented, we can involve the very people who might be impacted most whether children, parents, doctors, scientists, teachers, or others. In such situations it is useful to keep in mind McLuhan’s warning that there will always be hidden subliminal effects by all new media which we have not and sometimes cannot anticipate.

Dr. Thomas Cooper

But the very act of thinking before not after a new medium is publicly introduced lowers the risk and increases social awareness. Within the United States the FDA tests all drugs and foods prior to public release. Why not also thoroughly examine and think through the risks and potential impact of each new medium and “app” before it is sold to millions? In the process of thinking preventively and holistically, we may certainly use McLuhan’s insights, apercus and “laws” to anticipate and articulate potential effects and changes to “next-of-kin” media and processes brought by each new social medium and each new identify shift in journalism. But much more will be required to keep two yellow lights—one within journalism ethics and the other found on the social media home page—from turning red. Thinking as McLuhan did with percepts, not just concepts, with both hemispheres, with multiple disciplines, and with pattern recognition beyond paradigm, will be essential. References Cooper, T., C. Christians and A. Babbili. 2008. An Ethics Trajectory. Urbana Champagne: University of Illinois Press.

Cooper, T. 1998. “New Technology Effects Inventory.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 13 (2), 71- 93.

Cooper, T. 2000. “Speed-up and New Technology Ethics.” Pacific Telecommunication Review 21 (3), No. 3, 11-28.

Kovach, W. and T. Rosenstiel. 1999.Warp Speed. New York: The Century Foundation.

McLuhan, Marshall. and Eric McLuhan. 1988. Laws of the Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, Marshall and Eric McLuhan. 2011. Media and Formal Cause. New York: NeoPoiesis Press.

McLuhan, M. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy. 1962. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Pavlik, John. 1997. New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives, 2nd Edition. Needham Heights MA: Allyn & Bacon Press.