PASTEURIZING MEDIA

Countering “media fallout”

{{This was written by my friend, teacher, and colleague Marty Perlmutter and first appeared on his substack today.It is thought provoking, and I felt worth sharing

Marshall McLuhan had a central idea he termed “media fallout.” He knew the only way to avoid the mind-manipulation of media was awareness of how these modes of consciousness envelopment work on our brains. In the absence of awareness, you have media fallout. He explained this to advertising and broadcast executives of the time — half a century ago. He said that he felt a lot like Louis Pasteur in 1860. He was aware of pervasive and invisible forces that caused disease and spread infection. But all around were individuals, doctors along with patients, oblivious to imperceptible but all-too-real microbes that were killing them.

To become conscious of how balkanized, corrupted, disinforming and ever-more-pathetic media are shaping our minds and behaviors requires a quantum leap in awareness of invisible forces. Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News are the easiest of the “cavorting beasties” (as the inventor of the microscope termed single-cell organisms) to detect, and begin to disinfect. Social media, fragmented attention, cell phone dopamine addiction — these will take more time to elucidate and defang.

Our plight seems more fraught than simply entertaining ourselves to death. As McLuhan taught, what we’re not aware of will have its way with our delicate cerebra. A lot of what we’re dealing with now barely makes it to the cortex. This is the age of the medulla oblongata, the brain stem where fear and rage abide. While we are distracted, addicted, disinformed and terrorized, what hope is there that we’ll grok how this enveloping miasma operates?

Another teaching gives me hope. A peerless penetrator of the loom of passions and persuasions, Friedrich Nietzsche, taught, “Understanding stops action.” When you comprehend how something triggers you, when you grasp the roots of your convictions, there’s no heat, no drive to act. There is only a tranquility that passeth manipulation.

So spread the word: Cavorting beasties are abroad in the land. We cannot see or sense this stuff til we surface the mechanisms by which they reach into us. By slowly becoming aware of how these forces massage our senses, impact our feeling and thinking, we can disabuse ourselves of thralldom and become, truly and at last, free.