You can run but you can't hide

You can run but you can’t hide


In the middle of India’s anti-corruption stir fuelled by civil society, one is reminded of the theory of information blitzing and opinion building that underwrites the practice. Much of politics, apart from media, marketing, advertising and public relations runs on these very tracks.

I have to invoke Herbert Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian professor, who made a considerable impact when he published “The Medium is the Massage: an Inventory of Effects (1967). This book was about the effect of different mediums on the human sensorium. Media, such as TV with its visual content in addition to audio, radio, music on vinyl, even “noise”, were not only “hot” and “cool” on the senses, said McLuhan, but were “extensions” of human personalities, their emotions and thoughts.

McLuhan not only anticipated the ability of the various mediums of communication to witness, record, influence, but actually chronicle the inevitability of change.

Through the 1970s, hip media types toted McLuhan’s books around because they were loaded with futuristic phrases such as “global village” and “surfing”, meaning the very same as what we do today with keyboard and mouse, and not what beach boys do in Malibu or Bondi Beach.

McLuhan, who died in 1980, also visualised the “world-wide-web”, still called “www” in his very own phrasing, even though the internet was not even invented till the 1990s.

Marshall McLuhan anticipated the freedom of information and action the web would bestow on the ordinary member of the public. Still, he didn’t foresee the ubiquitous cellphone in every pocket, and the apexing and convergence of various abilities on this platform of great portability.

In the relatively simple 1960s and 1970s, technologically if not culturally speaking, people were exploring sexual freedom with the advent of the contraceptive pill- minus the scourge of HIV and AIDS. They were also much troubled by the inequities of the Vietnam War, in a time when left-liberalism, even socialism in certain quarters was thought to be fashionable.

In this setting, McLuhan’s message seemed both avant garde and psychedelic, rather than dazzlingly prescient. But then, given the mindset of the times, a lot of pronouncements did, such as Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary’s exhortation to: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.

This was not, we are now told, a call to use drugs, particularly LSD, and do nothing, as was popularly supposed; but a fairly cerebral call to look within. But then, till recently, we were still in the era of managing perception to reflect the reality we wanted to project.

Hence, in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks, Leary explained, though some would accuse The LSD using professor of revisionism: "Turn on meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive... Tune in meant interact harmoniously with the world around you... Drop out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change". This high-minded apologia could almost be a prescription for the awakened Civil Society of today, not willing to stomach the corruption meekly anymore, instead of a seemingly misinterpreted hippie battle cry from the seventies.

Leary even reworked his famous slogan for the personal computer era in the decade before he died in 1996. He now said, “turn on, boot up, jack in”, and presumably contribute to the cyberdelic counterculture that cannot be controlled by the state. Once a subversive, always a subversive, I suppose.

If indeed Leary was suggesting a cultural revolution via the net, isn’t it a little of what is happening in Indian Civil Society,both from the City (read Anna) and country (read Baba Ramdev), albeit vanguarded by conventional media, and so long as the Government does not send in the clowns. Murmurs about the “Emergency” have not surfaced without possibility.

But it isn’t just the freedom of the Internet and its denizens on Facebook and Twitter and the Blogosphere that is the McLuhan style massage here. In 2011, we have to accept that the nature of the domestic and global political discourse itself has changed irrevocably.

Traditional politics from the days of Julius Caesar involved the management of perception. JFK won his sliver thin presidential battle with Richard Nixon by suggesting the latter looked like an untrustworthy used car salesman, exploiting Nixon’s intense five ‘o clock shadow in his presidential bid advertisements. And the photogenic JFK handled the first televised presidential candidate debates very much better than the ill-at-ease Nixon. But then, Richard Nixon did manage to repackage himself expertly as described in “The Selling Of The President” by Joe McGinniss (1968), for his next, and successful bid for the high office.

But with the McLuhan Age no longer in the future, a new transparency, not intentional, not even voluntary, has come to stay, and will determine things going forward.

It is not just the brilliant simplicity of a virtual drop box in cyberspace that is at the heart of the Wikileaks phenomenon. It is the true, if inconvenient meaning of transparency, without the fear of consequences, for the anonymous “snitch”. Or even for the aggressive Tehelka brand of ambush journalism. It is the empowering technology being carried around in every pocket today on a cellphone; ubiquitous, but potent as a loaded gun.

And then there is streaming technology, used extensively and thus constantly improved by the purveyors of free pornography on the internet. It not only entertains millions, but also enables the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, the CIA Director and the military top brass of the US, sitting in Washington DC, to watch the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s lair in distant Abbotabad. And this, in real time.

Any place can be infiltrated, anything can be streamed and/or recorded with spy cameras, on cellphones, or be conveyed, as to what is decided, via text message or email, almost simultaneously, with reasonable anonymity.

It gives a new meaning to the notion of “live” reporting, because this kind does not need the services of a professional journalist, except perhaps to contextualise and distribute the information revealed. No Cabinet meeting, full of Union Ministers, notwithstanding their vows of secrecy and confidentiality, is safe anymore.

Besides, the 24x7 news channels have ample time and space to give blanket coverage to opposing view points, and the newspapers specialise in merciless analysis. Most importantly though, it is no longer a contest of political leanings packaged for the public like it was. Now the public can and does receive its news unvarnished. It is the political discourse that must adapt and mutate to suit.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan loved to cry that people knew nothing about his work. Well, perhaps now we do, when we recognise its effects all around us.

(1103 words)

7th June, 2011
Gautam Mukherjee


Published as Leader Edit Page under same title on 16th June 2011.Also online at www.dailypioneer.com,in The Pioneer ePaper, and archived under Columnists online at www.dailypioneer.com