#MediaStudies
Which medium matters more for this admin: TV or Internet?
The camera-addicted chattering class is addicted to every bit of drama from this admin like crack cocaine. But the Republican president is more native and addicted to ad-driven TV than he is to his Twitter account. TV cameras helped him thrive from a “wealthy” troubled reality TV host to a Twitter-abusing fiend to a joke presidential candidate to our 45th presidency, all within a span of 13 years.
This admin feeds upon the live broadcasting cameras in the press pool. This admin subsists on the cameras at his “campaign” rallies. This admin feeds on subservient one-way peepholes projecting his aura to the receiving, angered “audience”.
Cameras are designed to receive an image at one end and expel a simulation of that image out the other end to an audience who can’t talk back to the image they see.
And cameras, like the most “objective” reporter who merely quotes power verbatim like an automaton to the masses, are projective things. They don’t talk back to power as it is happening.
Social media microblogging is a backchannel for replying back to a simulation of power. It is reactive to power, and has exponentially “democratized” the chattering class through a few key gatekeepers. A reactive backchannel masticates and mangles the simulation, but is not able to project itself back to the front end of the camera.
Imagine a two-way camera apparatus which would project the backchannel’s reaction in real-time to the eyes of power while the power is being broadcast.
Imagine this admin watching social media’s reaction in real time while giving press conferences.
Or imagine if there were no cameras present at these events. No gatekeeping ad-driven cameras projecting power in one direction, no gatekeeping ad-driven reporters.
Some how, we can give less passive acceptance to the one-way, helpless acceptance of the image of power – and its inherent authoritarian tendency – upon which this admin thrives.
The backchannel, as troubled and violent as it is, must become the frontchannel.
