Bruce Charlton's Notions: Search results for McLuhan

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Wednesday 14 July 2021

Marshall McLuhan - is he worth reading?

My 2014 book Addicted to distraction: psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media (probably my 'best selling' book - although this is an exceedingly low bar!) began with Marshall McLuhan's statement The medium is the message; and continued with the following tribute:

Although more than 99% of what he wrote was (in my opinion) either wrong or nonsense, Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980) was nevertheless the first to see clearly that the key fact, the primary reality about the Mass Media is not the vast multitude of its specific contents; but rather its form as a whole, its unifying nature as a phenomenon, its underlying operating-principles. McLuhan therefore defined the subject of the Mass Media, drew a line around it, made it an object for study. This whole book can be seen as, in a sense, an unpacking and elaboration of McLuhan’s pregnant phrase: “The medium is the message” – therefore it seems appropriate that it be dedicated to the memory of that maddeningly-inconsistent volcano of creativity.

So, the short answer to my question "is Marshall McLuhan worth reading" must be - Yes! However, this is very much a Yes - but...

I was brought to think again about McLuhan after reading Douglas Coupland's 2010 MM book - subtitled "You know nothing of my work!" (quoting the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen hauls-out McLuhan from off camera, to refute a pompous fool bore who is pontificating in a cinema queue). Coupland's book is poor overall - marred by its superficial knowledge and journalistic tone, and its excruciating (assumed not argued, natch) political correctness/ virtue signaling.

(For all his affectation of cool insouciance; Coupland is throughout very evidently running scared - pre-emptively groveling in the face of feared-anticipated woke denunciation.)

Yet the book served to clarify 'what went wrong' with McLuhan - indeed, the several things that went wrong.

Most importantly, MM's brain tumour and then the extensive operation to remove it in 1967 was lethal to his creativity; so we need to judge MM only by his mature works written before 1966 - which means just two books: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.

A further problem with MM was that he was a brilliant/ inconsistent aphorist; who generated insights and nonsense in an unique and personal fashion; partly innate and partly from an unusual set of formative life experiences - including a rural Canadian upbringing, attendance at Cambridge University when it was the cutting edge of literary criticism, and being a devout Roman Catholic convert as an adult.

But, from the 1960s, and as he began to become extremely famous; McLuhan went against his own gifts and tried to make his insights into a kind of science (or, at least, a bureaucratic project): raising huge grants, setting-up a university research centre employing many people, and training many students in standard techniques of analysis, and doing (half-baked) experiments on the psychological effects of media.

What began as the erratic but original and stimulating products of one man's mind; transformed into an overblown, grandiose, fake academicism.

Yet, with all these provisos - there is a real (and timeless) energizing excitement that comes from those early McLuhan books, and from the first years of his fame. This was well captured in a excellent Penguin collection of excerpts, essays and interviews from 1968 called McLuhan: Hot & Cool and edited by GE Stearn. If you want to try McLuhan, maybe that is the best place to begin.

Note: My Addicted to Distraction book is - in retrospect - significantly flawed by my failure to recognize that - although the medium is indeed the main message, and the bad effects of the mass media are mainly due to the media form - there is a small percentage of core, mandatory media content (the 'litmus test' issues) that is of crucial importance to media functioning. This became fully evident in 2020 when the mass media became the channel and mechanism of government; and when censorship of media content became international, explicit and widely publicized. At times, in the UK, government by media was commonplace; as the media disseminated 'official' diktat (e.g. TV or video footage of some Establishment individual setting out policy). This literal media-channeled-dictatorship was, at times, the sole and unsupported method of mass control (with political and bureaucratic mechanisms wholly absent, or trailing behind). The fact that, in these core matters, the mass media are globally unified and centrally controlled (albeit by covert mechanisms, the nature of which I do not know for sure) is by now surely undeniable; nonetheless I missed it back in 2014!

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Marshall McLuhan's (one) Big Idea

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Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980) is, I think it fair to say, a once mega-famous but now almost-forgotten 1960s intellectual - the first major analyst of 'the media'.

If you want to know about him, I would recommend a 1968 Penguin anthology called McLuhan: Hot & Cool edited by GE Stearn. This was published at the height of McLuhan mania, when it still seemed possible that he was a 'genius' thinker of the stature of Marx, Weber and Freud (Marx? Freud? - Who they?...)

Yet there were also other voices pointing out that, by ordinary empirical standards of validity, most of what McLuhan said - on a sentence by sentence basis - was just plain wrong!

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My evaluation (having read a lot of and about McL on-and-off for more than twenty years) is that he was indeed more wrong than right, and certainly was not a genius (even before his creativity was obliterated by major brain surgery); but he had One Big Idea that was both new and true.

That was the idea encapsulated in his slogan The medium is the message - and it is the insight that the social importance of communications media (such as the lecture, the handwritten book, the printed book, the telegraph, telephone, television, internet) is not exhausted by their content.

The form and nature and properties of the medium is also very important; and perhaps more important than the specific content of the medium, since content may cancel-out in its effects, and also because communicable content is significantly constrained by the medium.

So that, over the long term, the societal importance of the printed book, the telephone or television may have more to do with the special qualities of that medium of communication than with what people write, say or watch.

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(Because I think this insight is correct, I am recurrently troubled about the effect of blogging; and engage in a probably futile fight against the nature of the medium by such negative self-limitations as not indexing my posts, not having a blogroll and - nearly always - not cross linking with the day's news and the current blogosphere. By such frictions I hope, somehow, to retain the reader's awareness of the medium, and his alertness to its distortions - not take it for granted.)

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McLuhan's One Big Idea seems to me to be both valid and sufficiently counter-intuitive to count as a very significant intellectual contribution.

And for this, if for not much else, McLuhan certainly deserves to be remembered.

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Friday 21 July 2017

My Marshall McLuhan book, and the reader's favourite: Addicted to Distraction

I get the impression that my 2014 book on the mass media (and dedicated to the memory of Marshall McLuhan) Addicted to Distraction is the most popular among readers (which, admittedly, isn't saying very much!)

Anyway for those of you who don't know, as well as traditional paper copy; it is available free online in an unformatted text version (to copy, paste and print):

http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk

Or, properly formatted, for a nominal price from Amazon Kindle.

The book was given very pleasing endorsements by Jim Kalb and John C Wright:

In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Charlton sheds brilliant light on fundamental features of our current situation. He develops Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" into a deeply illuminating account of the mass media as a self-sustaining techno-cultural system that absorbs the whole of human life into a virtual world of willfulness and unreality. Like Plato in his Myth of the Cave, he calls for each of us to turn away from flickering images and toward realities. We need to heed that call. --James Kalb: author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness

Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year. --John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist

Sunday 10 August 2014

Review of Addicted to Distraction on Throne, Altar, Liberty blog

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Review of my new book
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
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This is any authors's 'dream review' - thanks to Gerry T Neal

http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-cave-of-our-own-construction.html

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SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 2014

A Cave of Our Own Construction

Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G. Charlton, Buckingham, United Kingdom, University of Buckingham Press, 2014, 163 pp., £10

Among traditionalists, reactionaries, paleoconservatives and the rest of us who comprise what is usually called “the Right” it is customary, when the mass media is discussed, to maintain that it is heavily biased towards the Left. Our progressive opponents deride this claim, pointing to the television news channels, radio talk shows, and printed publications that offer an editorial perspective that is widely thought of as being “conservative”. In response we might point out that such media outlets offer a “neoconservative” perspective which is actually a form of liberalism – it is all about how democracy, capitalism and individualism are the hope and salvation of mankind, to be brought to the uttermost corners of the world by the force of the American military if necessary. A defense of actual conservative ideas and institutions, from a perspective that is critical of the modern assumptions that neoconservatives shared with the progressive and liberal Left is avoided by the media like the plague.

Recently, however, I encountered the following sentence which offers a rather different assessment of the relationship between the mass media and the Left:

Leftism is the Mass Media, and the Mass Media is Leftism, inseparable, the same thing: this of course means that Leftism (in its modern form) depends utterly on the continuation of the Mass Media (depends on itself!), stands or falls with the Mass Media. (bold indicates italics in original)

This remarkable sentence can be found on pages 26 to 27 of a fascinating new book entitled Addicted to Distraction. The author is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton, a physician and psychiatrist who is Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham. He is also a Christian and a prominent blogger in that right-wing sector of the internet known as the “Orthosphere” in the broader sense of the term that includes not just the website by that name but various others with a similar right-wing, traditionalist Christian perspective, including Dr. Charlton’s own site, where the term was originally coined, and this one.

The quoted sentence would elicit from many, probably most, people the response that it confuses the distinction between that which is neutral – in this case the technology of large-scale communication – and that which is charged – the thoughts and words conveyed by that technology. This is a conditioned response, one which is made without much if any thought being put into it, and it raises the question of how valid this distinction actually is. Canada’s greatest conservative philosopher, George Grant, did not think it was valid and devoted much of his thought and writing to demonstrating that technology was anything but neutral. It was another Canadian of Grant’s generation, a pioneer in the study of media communications named Marshal McLuhan, who famously remarked that “the medium is the message” and it is from the launching pad of this insight of McLuhan’s that Dr. Charlton’s own reflections on the nature of the mass media take off.

This does not mean that the mass media that he equates with the Left consists merely of communications technology. Dr. Charlton distinguishes between two senses of the expression mass media. There is the technology itself – print, radio, television, internet, etc – and then there is the system into which all this technology is integrated, the “unified network of communications”. It is the latter which is the focus of his discussion.

Another important distinction he makes is between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Marxist Left of the trades unions and socialist parties was revolutionary but it was also utopian and visionary. It sought to overthrow the institutions of the existing order but with the idea that it would replace them with a new order that would be a Paradise on earth. The New Left is the Left of “Permanent Revolution” or “perpetual opposition”, which Dr. Charlton describes as the idea that:

The true revolutionary – such as the avant garde artist or radical intellectual – was intrinsically subversive; and would always be in revolt against whoever was in power, changing sides as necessary to achieve this. (p. 18)

If the New Left is always seeking to subvert, oppose, and to overthrow then its agenda is entirely negative. It seeks nothing but destruction and is essentially nihilistic. This, Dr. Charlton argues, is also the essential nature of the mass media.

He describes several specific techniques by which the mass media subverts the good. For example, when Anders Brevik killed all those kids in Norway a couple of years ago the media initially reported that he was a right-wing Christian. Brevik was not a professing Christian at all but the initial reports that contained the falsehood created a far deeper impression than subsequent retractions. Dr. Charlton calls this “first strike framing”, a technique whereby the media subverts something positive – in this case Christianity – by creating a false association in the first reports of an atrocity from which the lasting visceral response is derived. (pp. 71-75)

The subversiveness of the mass media does not lie merely in certain techniques, however. Nor is it to be found in some cabal of conspirators who pull the levels of the media behind the scenes, Dr. Charlton insists, but in the very nature of the system itself. The mass media, as he describes it, is an integrated network of communications technology that has so permeated society that it envelops and surrounds us. It generates a pseudoreality of image and opinion that distracts us from the real world in which we live. The images and opinions it generates are subject to change at any moment and may completely contradict those that preceded them but are presented to us as absolute truths disagreement with which renders a person a dangerous, crazy, outsider. This combination of short-term absolutism with long-term complete relativism, Dr. Charlton labels “Opinionated Relativism”. By distracting us from the real world, common sense, and personal experience and bombarding us with dogmatic but ever-changing opinions and images it subverts our confidence in that which is true, good, and beautiful. His characterization of it as evil and demonic seems entirely appropriate.

So what do we do about it?

While Dr. Charlton does not proffer a plan as to how the mass media system can be defeated as a whole – he indicates that the system will have to collapse on its own before there can be a large scale return to reality – he offers some helpful suggestions as to how we can deal with it as individuals. We are addicted to the false reality the mass media presents us, he argues, and rather than try to wean ourselves off of it, for those who think that they can pick out what is good from the mass media are the most deceived and deluded, we ought to quit it cold turkey. While the process of “detoxing”, by which we stop seeking out, paying attention to, and believing the media and turn our attention back towards reality is one that will involve failure – for we are immersed in the media in societies where everybody is an addict – there is hope, he says, at least for the Christian, because reality is superior to the falsehoods of the media.

Addicted to Distraction is a short book but one that is packed with insights the surface of which I have only begun to scratch in this review. I heartily recommend it.

GERRY T. NEAL

http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/

Thursday 12 December 2013

What is the Mass Media, and what is/are its function/s?

[What follows is first draft of a section from my forthcoming book.]

The mass media, as an autonomous social system, is a relatively new thing; and (although already in existence) was only recognized as an entity in its own right (The Media) from about the nineteen fifties by Marshal McLuhan.

The mass media are defined by communications which go from one to many persons (or from a small group to a much larger one).

In sum, a mass medium is a system of amplification for communications: such as a printed book or newspaper, a radio or TV program, an internet blog or the 'social' media such as (written in 2013) Facebook and Twitter.

Before the Mass Media, there were several mass media – and some of these reached quite a massive scale of amplification such as the lecture, the play or gladiatorial and sport spectacles such as chariot racing – which in Roman times had reached an amplification rate of one to many thousands – thanks to the technology of the amphitheatre.

Writing is potentially a system of amplification since it allows for copying, but the most famous mass medium is the printed page – credited to Gutenburg's invention of moveable type.

But in these early times the mass media was simply a range of technologies for amplifying communications – and the communications originated from other social systems that has the usual social functions; systems such as government, the military, the legal system, the various arts, and scholarship (such as theology, philosophy and science).

Early media took their functions from the social systems they served. There was no single Mass Media, and the functions were as diverse as informing and entertaining – for example when mass media amplified government – perhaps in writing by pamphlets or through newspapers, they might provide information, or provide a conduit for propaganda – intended to shape behaviour, or perhaps provide some kind of ethical inspiration or guidance.

When a mass medium amplified science it was perhaps educating via a textbook, informing via a scientific paper, or may be popular science in a newspaper or radio broadcast. When a medium amplified the arts (e.g. by printing a novel or poem, or broadcasting a play on television) it could be proving entertainment, or an aesthetic experience.

At this point, therefore, the various mass media had no unified function – they were merely mechanisms for amplifying the communications of functional social systems – so it could be said that they served to do something along the lines of conveying information, aesthetic experience, entertainment and propaganda.

However, once the various mass media reached a certain size and began to cross-communicate, then the system of mass media communication began to communicate with each other; that is to refer to, and to react to, each other.

At this point the Mass Media could be considered a separate system. It was no longer just a mechanism for amplifying the communications from other systems, but the various media reacted to stimuli from each other – and the output from these was... more reactions. The Mass Media was a system, and the system was (potentially) autonomous.

So, a newspaper runs a story – and this story could originate from almost anywhere – discovered by the mass media's own 'reporters', from a press release, from a rumour – it does not matter; but this story is repeated in the broadcast media and across the internet and evokes reactions from all these sources – leading to stories about the story; and any or several of these stories about stories may lead to further reactions – and so on.

Thus while the old mass media were merely amplifiers; the modern Mass Media is substantially independent of the other social systems. Whereas the old mass media would inform – because it was simply telling more people what other social systems had generated; the modern Mass Media select, re-shape and just plain invent outputs which are 'designed' (intended) merely to evoke reactions from itself.

Therefore while the old mass media had not intrinsic function, because it was not a system; but merely a set of amplifiers; the modern Mass Media has no intrinsic function because it simply generates outputs to evoke reactions from itself.

But his is not, of course, purely technological: humans are necessarily involved. The constraint upon this is that people must be induced to participate cognitively in this process of reacting – the system of the modern Mass Media must therefore include human minds, as well as technologies. Somebody must read some of the newspapers and react in some way – whether by buying, or gossiping, or voting, or rioting – and thus provide feedback stimuli thereby to close the loop and re-fuel the Mass Media

The point is that it may at one time have been reasonable to summarize the mass medias functions as (say) informing and entertaining – since the mass media took information perhaps from science and amplified it; now the Mass Media generates stories which it references to science, but these stories do not have to be true – certainly the stories do not need to be true according to scientific criteria. Media science stories are simply references to science, and may variously be true or selected, distorted or invented as seems most likely to provoke Mass Media responses some of which will lead on to further Mass Media responses – of a type that engages sufficient people in such a way as to fuel further communications (buying more newspapers, generating advertising revenue or subscriptions or buying more equipment or whatever). But there is no reason why a science story should be true.

Similarly with entertainment. For traditional mass media to amplify entertainments they generally had to be enjoyable – to sell a lot of novels, people had to enjoy the novel; to get a lot of people to watch something on TV is needed to make people happy, or excited or make them laugh or something... But in the modern Mass Media, entertainment does not need to entertain; so long as it compels some kind of attention this works just as well as entertainment; and since it is difficult to entertain people en masse and for long periods, there is not much entertaining going-on.

So although there remains an element of entertainment the modern Mass Media attract attention by any and every means: by evoking disgust, horror, fear, lust, repulsion, self-satisfaction, pity for others, self-pity, hero-worship, scapegoating... and then reacting to these responses, and reacting to the reactions.

The most typical modern Mass Media event is therefore some kind of staged pseudo-'reality' show, consisting of people who evoke strong reactions, engineered into situations designed to evoke responses – which may then be displayed to elicit further responses. These shows neither entertain nor inform; but are calculated simply to attract and engage attention by whatever means, and evoke opinions and behavioural feedback which may be harvested and channelled into an iterative process which serves nothing beyond its own growth in communications.

(The above is a response to WmJas's suggestion in a comment that the Mass Media did have a function: namely to inform and entertain.)

Tuesday 5 March 2013

Why did mobile phones and social networking turn out to be mere extensions and amplifiers of the mass media?

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It seems clear that the spread in usage of mobile phones and internet social networking websites of the Facebook type has been an exacerbation, a continuation of the trend, of the mass media - and an extension and deepening of secular hedonism and alienation.

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Yet, in principle, if we had not experienced the opposite, it might be supposed that by keeping people in touch more of the time, the influence of the mass media would be held-back - that by people-interacting-with-people for more of the time, and with more people, the ideology of the mass media would be blocked.

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(Just as so many people - including myself - used to suppose that the internet would combat the domination by 'official' news media, to facilitate an informed society where everybody discovered the real facts behind the propaganda, and formed their own opinions. Ha! - How utterly and completely wrong can anyone be!)

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This is obviously not the case, and the interpersonal media are instead serving as an addiction and a distraction: an addictive distraction.

In theory, the new interpersonal media should strengthen marriage and family relations by keeping the members in-touch; in practice these media are at the heart of a society zealously engaged in the coercive destruction of families.

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The main consequence of pervasive social communication media is that people are out of touch with their environment for more of the time, that they never self-remember, that they are prevented from experiencing the life they are in.

In the recent past, a person walking alone might be stimulated to look around, listen, smell, feel the air flowing past them - be where they are. Not now.

They almost never experience the here and the now.

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Once again, the prime insight of Marshall McLuhan has been confirmed - that the primary effect of media is indifferent to content.

The fact of interpersonal mass media has an effect which quite overwhelms the specifics of interpersonal information exchange via these media.

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So, it hardly matters what is said, or heard, or seen via these media; the major consequence of the fact of the medium is vastly more powerful than the specifics of communication.

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This explains how it is that our society has been able to absorb such incredible changes as the internet and ubiquitous mobile phones and vast social networking websites while - at a fundamental level - having been unaffected by them.

And without any significant overall economic benefits - indeed, increasingly obvious deep damage to economic productivity in the sense that Western societies have simply given-up even trying to run an economy.

The trends in place before the internet have continued. The advent and growth of the internet was imperceptible at a mass level of analysis.

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We do not control these media; they control us.

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So interpersonal communications media are part of the mass media.

And the mass media is the primary domain of evil in our society, here and now.

Not only and not mostly in the sense of being loaded with accidental and deliberately corrupting communications of evil; but in the primary sense that the addictive distraction of the mass media is anti-good, is a turning-away-from reality (and therefore God).

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It is the fact of the medium which is the essence - and this fact is a fact: engagement can be moderated but participation is mandatory.

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Friday 11 November 2016

Addicted to distraction: psychological consequences of the mass media - by Bruce G Charlton, 2014

Addicted to Distraction (2014) was the follow-up to Thought Prison (2011) my analysis of political correctness. Addicted to Distraction focuses on the mass media; which it regards not as primarily a means of passing on content; but as itself - in its structure and operations - a form of communication that is intrinsically secular, Leftist and nihilistic.

The book also sees the social system of the mass media as being the single most important system in the modern West; but a social system with properties like no other.

The book is now freely available online - it is in my punchy aphorism style, and runs at about 26,000 words.

Endorsements:

In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Charlton sheds brilliant light on fundamental features of our current situation. He develops Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" into a deeply illuminating account of the mass media as a self-sustaining techno-cultural system that absorbs the whole of human life into a virtual world of willfulness and unreality. Like Plato in his Myth of the Cave, he calls for each of us to turn away from flickering images and toward realities. We need to heed that call.

James Kalb: author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness
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Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year.

John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist

Thursday 24 April 2014

Addicted to distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media

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It isn't published yet, but my new book is now listed on Amazon.

http://tinyurl.com/q46qwqa

Addicted to distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media

University of Buckingham Press - forthcoming.

In this groundbreaking study, Bruce Charlton sheds brilliant light on fundamental features of our current situation. He develops Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" into a deeply illuminating account of the mass media as a self-sustaining techno-cultural system that absorbs the whole of human life into a virtual world of willfulness and unreality. Like Plato in his Myth of the Cave, he calls for each of us to turn away from flickering images and toward realities. We need to heed that call.

--James Kalb: author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness

Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G Charlton is a brilliant, pithy, and incisive analysis and condemnation of the modern mass media and its semipurposeful agenda of permanent revolution, permanent hysteria, and permanent chaos. His comments are as cutting as the scalpel of a surgeon performing an autopsy, and his insights a bright and clear as the merciless lights in an operating theater. Can a fish drown? Can it even notice the waters in which it lives and moves? No more than can we notice the totalitarian relativism of the modern mass media. The Mass Media is a roaring, grinding attention-grabbing machine which operates with no set purpose; except the purpose to subvert, uncreate, mock and destroy. It does not matter what the media destroys. Pointless subversion is the point of the media, and the medium is the message. By all means read and understand this book ... and then go out by yourself into the calm and silent wilderness for a year.

--John C Wright, author and Nebula Award finalist

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Monday 18 October 2010

Has the internet encouraged or defeated political correctness?

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Many on the secular right (libertarians - such as I was until a few years ago) believed that the internet (including blogs) and other modern mass communication media would act against the excesses of PC, by preventing the elites from controlling information.

I certainly believed that.

But overall this prediction was quite wrong, and I think that overall the opposite has been the case.

In other words, the modern mass communication media have increased the scope and strength of PC.

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This is because the problem of PC was not due to lack of contrary information.

(I should have realized this - after all, PC can be refuted simply by taking personal experience at face value.)

Instead the modern communications media have hugely exacerbated the distractability of the elites, and their tendency mentally to inhabit an abstract realm where ideas are played-with and where morality is chosen on the basis of lifestyle considerations.

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Indeed, PC probably depends on the mass media - since it has grown up in parallel with the media; and is not found in societies which lack a large mass media.

The least politically correct groups are those which leads the most detached lives, those with the least frequent interaction with the culture of internet, cellphones and the like.

If/ when the mass media collapse, so will PC.

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In a McLuhan-esque fashion, the content of the mass media seems to matter less than the psychological effects of its structure: with the elicited psychological responses of abstraction, distraction, neophilia, unreality, pick-and-mix hedonism, and so on, and so forth....

Anything which reinforces the intellectuals' (natural) tendency to ignore the here and now and objectively constrained, in favour of the remote and potential and subjectively wishful - will overall tend to encourage political correctness.

And it has.

And I realise that this appears to make blogging a self-refuting activity for reactionaries - and this is true, but only overall. This blog may be one of the exceptions

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