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BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GWOT Year 6 - 2007
The revolution will be televised by Rod Dreher  #
The revolution will be televised Bush & Co. must learn to fight on the information battlefield to be effective in the war on terror, says ROD DREHER 09:51 AM CST on Sunday, February 4, 2007 BY ROD DREHER / The Dallas Morning News Adead Canadian professor and the queen of England have a lot to teach Washington about how not to run the war on Islamic terror. The late media theorist Marshall McLuhan - he would be the dead Canadian - was a true visionary. Few of his ardent admirers, however, realize how deeply conservative he was. A devout Catholic, Mr. McLuhan once said that he sought to understand the way media shaped our collective and individual consciousness so that he would be prepared to resist its effects. "I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change," Mr. McLuhan said, "but I am determined to understand what's happening. Because I don't choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me." Mr. McLuhan, who came to prominence in the 1960s and died in 1980, was one of the first to understand how radically the electronic media stood to change culture and society. His best-known aphorism - "The medium is the message" - encapsulated his most important insight: that what is said matters less than how it is said. The information environment we live in shapes our thought processes in ways we only dimly perceive. Cultures shaped by the printed word prized logic, reason and dispassion. But a global culture conditioned by television - which is to say, by the power of sound and image - to process information a certain way, Mr. McLuhan taught, will revert to pre-modern modes of thought. It will be more emotional, more tribal, less trusting of traditional authority and more inclined to privilege individual judgment. And it will have more political and religious extremism. If you want to see what can happen to leaders who don't understand the political effect of the revolution in consciousness Mr. McLuhan prophesied, go see the Oscar-nominated film The Queen. The drama, which concerns a crisis in the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II, is a McLuhanesque parable of how traditional authority and the power that comes with it can slip through the fingers of those who don't understand how television and mass media have utterly transformed everything they've touched. "Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery," Mr. McLuhan once prophesied. "The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be." The global media transformed Diana Spencer, a flighty but enormously photogenic English clotheshorse married to the future British king, into a virtual demi-goddess. The Queen dramatizes how Elizabeth struggles to cope with the unanticipated challenge that Diana's death laid down to her own authority. Diana's death occasioned an unprecedented outpouring of public grief from the British people. They loved her intensely, in part because years of obsessive media coverage created the illusion of personal intimacy between Diana and her public. In the film as in real life, the queen chose to remain stoically quiet and above it all. She believed that the British expected their monarch to remain aloof from popular emotion, and faithful to protocol. Hadn't they always? Her reserve was disastrous. The public, already in an emotionally pitched state of grief, turned angrily on their monarch for what they took to be her coldness. The media piled on, making the situation far worse. In the end, the queen came through by making symbolic gestures of sympathy that, however minor, carried enormous weight. And she learned several lessons about leadership in an age of electronic mass media: "Public opinion is driven heavily by images and the emotions they evoke - not only in a given moment, but over the long term. "The individual generally privileges his own judgment over that of traditional elites. "Under the right circumstances, mass opinion can be mobilized quickly against traditional authority figures, who must have the means to adapt with haste to the new information environment if they wish to hold on to their power to influence events and thus to conserve their own power. The U.S. government is like the queen, cluelessly clinging to a media and public relations strategy best suited for the day before yesterday. The president put in charge of public diplomacy an old friend, Karen Hughes, whose best-known sortie in this job was a "listening tour" of the Mideast that more or less flopped. In earlier times, it might have been acceptable to put America's propaganda operation in the hands of a conventional political operative. But we are now living in a time when something as crude as a grainy cellphone video of Saddam Hussein's execution can rocket around the Arab world in a day or two via the Internet and do more damage to America's policy in Iraq - in terms of further radicalizing Sunnis in Iraq and in the region - than a month of car bombs. Some at the State Department understand the dire situation we're in. Strategist David Kilcullen explained in The New Yorker that the global war on terror is "fundamentally an information fight. The enemy gets that, and we don't yet get that. And I think that's why we're losing." Terrorists, he said, blow up Humvees more for the sake of the video. The images are distributed on the Internet, where they spread virally and are used to win supporters and donations. "Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it," said Steve Fondocaro, a retired Army colonel who served in Iraq. "We have to fight on the information battlefield." This is especially true given that 50 percent of the Arab population is 18 and younger. These Arabs are growing up with their consciousness transformed by satellite TV, the Internet and other forms of new media, which will do as much to change the psychological dynamics of power in the Arab Islamic world as they have done to change it in our own world over the last half-century. The jihadis know this. To fight them effectively on this critical front requires a level of tactical and strategic sophistication that we haven't seen from this administration, which arranges events like sending Ms. Hughes to China a couple of weeks ago with Michelle Kwan on a goodwill tour. America needs to deploy a commander with the conceptual depth of a Marshall McLuhan and the ruthless brilliance of a Joseph Goebbels. Instead, we have a PR generalissima who turns up in Turkey saying things like: "I am a mom, and I love kids. I love all kids. And I understand that is something I have in common with the Turkish people." It's like sending the Polish cavalry forward to engage the Wehrmacht. Is this the best we can do? The queen was cloistered behind the palace walls and centuries of tradition. What's the Bush administration's excuse? Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@ dallasnews.com. |