It's not Trump, it's us?

(LiveJournal, when it was still a thing, had a tool that let you broadcast what you were listening to as you were writing. I don’t know if Blogger has that, but if so, it’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon).

This week’s articles are prescient in today’s age of fake news and alt-facts. And I wonder how much less hold those two terms would have in the media today if more of the terminology from the anthropology of the Internet were to come into broader usage. As Gershon notes, every person has a unique media ideology. Different communication (text, e-mail, chat) and social media platforms serve different purposes and vary by age, gender, nationality, etc. And each of these in turn provide “second order communication:” information that should guide us in understanding how particular words and statements should be interpreted.

In many ways, the debate over truth is partly symptomatic of divergence in the ways that the left and right use and understand the media. Using Paul Simon to illustrate:

The Left: “The problem is all inside your head…The answer is easy if you take it logically.”

The Right: “Just slip out the back, Jack. Make a new plan, Stan. Don’t need to be coy, Roy, just listen to me. Hop on the bus, Gus, don’t need to discuss much. Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.”

Gershon notes that we have yet to develop standardized idioms of practice with new media precisely because they are so new. While How the World Changed Social Media counters this point by acknowledging the constant change in the use of new media, both help to clarify current debate’s over Trump’s use of Twitter, “evidence,” etc. Most coverage of the media by the media has largely assumed that critical coverage of the Trump presidency is either preaching to the choir or falling on deaf ears. I think more likely is that many in the country have widely diverging media ideologies. A tweet consisting of facts that can be empirically verified is at the same time a thinly veiled barb at the left. Why shouldn’t we take Trump at face value that his conception of “wiretapping” is so diffuse as to include all forms of surveillance? He hasn’t exactly said anything true in the past, and perhaps the left’s insistence that he do so is simply interpreting his words through the wrong media ideology. (I’m pushing that further than I believe, but I think it does help to understand the ways that this is all perhaps an uphill battle). It’s only unfortunate that we can’t just end the relationship with him through clicking a button. (Yes, I am sure I would like to end the relationship.)