Today’s Media Ecology Lesson

All cultures manufacture consent, ie. a shared mythology, employing the medium of communication available to them. 

Time binding cultures set their rules and beliefs in a durable medium like stone. 

Think Egyptian. 

Space binding cultures use portable media like papyrus or paper to transmit their message of manufactured consent across the space they control. Think Roman. 

Our electronic and digital media are perhaps the first technologies that enable the binding of time AND space, though the bias of the electronic broadcast media was centralized messaging while the bias of digital network media is decentralized messaging.

New media technologies threaten the hegemony of the existing manufactured consent, leading to the type of disruptions that we experience today in our public sphere.  Marshall McLuhan suggested that a paradigm shift such as we are currently experiencing almost always leads to violence as men and women struggle to create a new identity within the affordances of the rising medium and hence a new public shared consent mythos.

That loss of the previous shared mythos is what creates the fear and despair of both the oppressors AND the oppressed. It is NOT caused by economic or social inequality, political oppression or religious differences, though it may be expressed through them. My understanding is that revolutions are often led by members of the ruling or favored class who use the despair of the populace to affect political change. The techniques they use to manufacture the new consent are determined by the affordances and the biases of the media they employ.

Shared consent is created by the stories people tell each other explicitly and implicitly through their media of communication. Control the stories people tell and the means by which they tell them and you control the culture.