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Trump has set the trap. His words are the mechanism [1]
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Date: 2022-12-13
Consider the following axiom by Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 classic “The Medium Is the Message”:
What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
It seems clear that Twitter, more than any other current social media platform, has been the most transformative to popular culture. As someone who has been somewhat removed from social media, I say this from the outside looking in, but Twitter appears to be heftier than Facebook as well as any of the other instant micromessaging systems such as Gab or Parler. It has more reach and depth into more peoples’ daily lives. Here, perhaps, is McLuhan’s scale.
McLuhan tells us to look also at speed. More than anything, Twitter is a platform for reaction, because it is near-instantaneous. If something happens anywhere in the world, if someone has access to Twitter, they can make an exclamation about it and immediately someone else can receive their words. We’ve never had this type of speed for everyday communication before in quite this way.
A little bit ago, I extended a metaphor about the brain, specifically white matter. If you take a neuron, the length of its body is its axon, and the terminal is where it communicates with others. The body is encased in a fatty substance called myelin, and it’s this sheath or coating that boosts and insulates the electrical pulse, sending it along up to 100x faster than along an unmyelinated axon. So when someone quips that something is happening “at the speed of thought,” this is the speed to which they refer, this split-second ability of a neuron to reach the next.
Host: You can think of it as using a train network to travel around a city. So if you want to get from Point A to Point B, and Point B is five kilometers away, you could walk, but it would take you some time. But if you catch a train, it’s much faster, and it’s the same with your brain.
Consider that, in terms of methods of publishing, tweets are the nearest approximation we have to such instantaneous communication, from one individual to another.
Notably, there’s no middleman, no publishing house with an editor who serves as a guard at the gate. There’s no quality control or vetting that happens in the broad, wild frontier that is Twitter. There is a person’s hot take; and there is their asymmetrical relationship with all of their followers where the person tweeting can have the same message reach multitudinous minds in a split second. They get to iterate their message in one blow to over any number of viewers. This is an inherently unbalanced relationship: there is no equal say.
Tweets are the nearest thing we have to an electronic synapse. This is the level of speed in play. Other publishing methods do not compare.
When Twitter suspended Donald Trump from its platform in the wake of January 6, we all understood that was the equivalent of using bolt cutters on a transmission line. When Elon Musk, after appropriating Twitter for himself, attempted to get Trump to return to the platform, this made headline news around the world because we instinctively know that that type of tool in Trump’s hands (tiny or no) is a functional synapse. It instantly bridges his desires with his followers’ minds.
It’s just as well that Trump myopically chained himself to his own attempt at undercutting Twitter. Pravda TruthSocial is now structural lag. Trump is required to use that platform for his tweet-like communications by contract; and since TruthSocial has not perfused itself into society the way Twitter has, by the time the message migrates to Twitter via retweet or other means the immediacy is somewhat lost. This will be the case until (1) Trump gets out of his contract, (2) TruthSocial overtakes Twitter in popularity/use, or (3) another advance in communication speed overtakes tweets altogether.
Still, the split-second speed is troublesome, because as long as Trump has this capability, he has the power to rouse would-be commandants at the flick of a finger.
Whatever one may say about the relationship between Trump and his followers, one cannot argue against the fact that they listen to him. They pay attention to his words and, for some, those words are sacrosanct. They may even be a call to arms. Again, we’ve seen this.
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