In 1967, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the massage,” often as not corrupted to “the medium is the message.”  What he meant was that the medium had become so all-embracing as to massage the receiver and to affect the meaning of the message.  In the years since, particularly in the last decade, Americans and, indeed, most of the technological world embraced the corrupted version of his philosophy with a vengeance, despite the fact that, in fact, the medium is NOT the message, because all form has to have some sort of content.

The problem is and has always been that the obsession with form [the medium] tends to dilute the content to the point where it’s so vapid at times that the information content and value is insignificant, trivial, or irrelevant.  Even when it’s not, that content is often overpowered by the form of the message… or in the case of Twitter, e-mail, texting, etc., the existence of so many competing message-forms. As I’ve noted before, the amount of “real” information I receive, either in paper or electronic form, is less than one percent of the total information sent to me.  I’m fortunate; I can read quickly and dismiss the junk without missing much.  I’ve learned that most people can’t, and, because they can’t, or won’t spend the time to sift logically though all those “communications,” many just prioritize by the flash of what hits them, by, if you will, the effectiveness of the massage created by the form of the message.

Do all those tweets, texts, voice-mails, and even cellphone calls really carry any meaning?  Aren’t most of them merely reaching out so that their senders and receivers can be reassured and “massaged” in some way?  All this massaging is having an effect, and much of it is anything but good.  Mayors in several cities, and legislators across the USA, are calling for restrictions on cellphones, ear buds, and other devices being used, not just by drivers, but by pedestrians as well, as the number of fatalities caused by both distracted drivers and walkers/runners has begun to increase markedly. 

This wide-spread need for instant reassurance and instant information is also reducing the attention span of students and younger Americans, and recently a large number of professionals have begun to publish books and studies on the deleterious effects of too much instant communication.  Interesting enough, several of these have been called “attacks on the information age.”  Yet, none of the critics are attacking the technology; they’re attacking the way in which people are using it and the growing dangers posed both to individuals and society by such uses. 

Another impact of the growing impact of the “medium massage” is the dumbing down of mass media to make it “more reassuring.”  One example is in cinema. My wife is a movie buff, and over the years I’ve been exposed to movies I never knew existed, but one thing that’s become very clear to me is that many third-rate movies from fifty years ago have better writing [not necessarily better plots] and more clever dialogue than most first rate movies today.  Why?  There may be a number of reasons, but I think the bottom line is simply that there was more emphasis on message and meaning than on medium.  Special effects and brilliant cinematography are now what draw the most viewers, not provoking and insightful dramas.

I’m not attacking the media or the technology, but I am attacking the glorification of the gadgets and the use of technology to swathe users in continuously-communicating social reassurance.  A social massage once in a while is fine; continuous social massaging is like any other addiction – destructive, and it’s well past time to call it what it is.

The other day I read a report on studies that tend to confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the idea that language affects the very fashion in which we think and even how we think. In turn, that got me to thinking about theories and the controversies which surround them.  While what Whorf postulated almost seventy years ago certainly made sense to him, and the idea behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis made sense to me when I read Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao years and years ago, long before I even knew that Whorf and Sapir even existed, much less that Whorf had postulated what Vance wrote about more than thirty years before the book, at the time Whorf offered their theory there was no proof… and no real way to offer such proof.  The same was also initially true about the theory of continental drift and the idea of plate tectonics, and even, if for a shorter time, that of Einstein’s theories of relativity.

The lack of proof didn’t mean that the theories were right – or wrong – but merely that they could neither be proved nor disproved at the time they were first offered.  In the cases I’ve mentioned, the preponderance of evidence suggests the theories were correct, or at least largely so.

But… how can you tell the difference between a theory which might be true, if proof existed, and one that is absurd because no proof can ever be developed?  Can you?

And what about the cases where the “proof” itself is not accepted, as was certainly partly true in the case of continental drift?

Human beings want certainty in their science, but the more we learn the more we discover, in essence, that there are exceptions, i.e., modifications, complications, refinements, etc.  Just as the human genome is finally sequenced, research discovers that genes are not even the genetic end-all and be all, because there’s an epigenetic mechanism that can modify and even override genes. 

Unfortunately, the all too understandable reaction of many people is to claim that scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, or that they’re always changing their minds.  Part of this reaction, I suspect, is based on the human arrogance that we should be able to know everything, and that if our supposedly best scientific minds don’t, then they’re not the best… or they’re not good for anything. Another reaction is that mankind was never meant to know everything, and we should just look to our favorite deity for explanations – which are, of course, simple and comforting… and explain very little.

Of course, a little humility in the search for answers and explanations wouldn’t hurt, either, along with the understanding that in a universe that’s taken over fourteen billion years to develop, it might just take a bit more time than the few hundred years humans have had the technology to seek the answers to the complexity of the universe.

But then, that means you can’t get the answer on Google instant.

Over at Tor.com, a blogger under the nom de plume of “Stubby the Rocket” recently conducted a poll, asking readers to vote on the best fantasy and science fiction novels of the past decade. Fortunately or unfortunately, the readers aren’t.  They’re voting for their favorite books, and, apparently, reading between the lines, they’re even voting for their favorite authors, almost without regard for the comparative excellence or lack thereof of some authors’ works. What is also interesting is that when one internet-popular author made an on-line appeal, his readers immediately flooded the voting thread, and pushed his book to the top.

I have no problem with readers pushing their favorites. I’d love to have my readers push all my books – but I’m not making an appeal, because that isn’t the point of this blog, and besides the voting closed several days ago. The point is, as one commenter on the Tor.com main site observed, that most of the voters aren’t voting for what they believe to be the best, but for their favorites. So why didn’t Tor.com and Stubby the Rocket just ask for the books readers liked the most? Then they could publish, more or less honestly, “Reader Favorites for the Decade.”

As I’ve discussed recently and not-so-recently, there’s a great deal of subjectivity and ignorance involved in determining what comprises a good book, and while I believe that the majority of readers, if pressed, would make a distinction, the poll-takers didn’t emphasize that there’s a difference between “favorite” and “best.” Another weakness with all of these polls, and that includes such awards as the Hugos [the World Science Fiction awards, for those readers not familiar with such], is that a comparatively small number of voters are represented, usually from a distinct sub-set of readers, and are usually self-selecting, which means that they don’t represent the majority of readers.

Years and years ago, Betty Ballantine, one of the great ladies of F&SF publishing, made the observation that there are two kinds of awards in publishing, those awarded by various organizations with varying memberships and agendas and those represented by the sales figures.  A number of years ago, many of those involved with the World Science Fiction convention were truly horrified when the winner of the best novel award went to a Harry Potter book.  Was it the best book of the year, technically?  I doubt it, but it was at least an honest “favorite,” one whose sales figures also declared that it was truly a favorite.

I honestly doubt that there’s any fair or accurate way to determine a “best” book.  So why don’t all the pollsters ask for favorites or books that are best-liked?  That way, at least, we wouldn’t have the charade of popularity being mistaken for excellence or the equally misleading charade of self-selecting groups foisting off their favorites as the “best of the decade” when they really mean the “favorite books of this group for the decade.”  But then, who wants to publish a list of “favorites” when “best books” sounds so much better and more “official” in print?

Well… it’s now “bonus season,” I understand, for high-level executives among the banks, investment banks, brokerage houses, and the like.  At a time when even supposedly well-off working professionals aren’t doing all that well, early reports are that the financial institutions are set to pay near-record bonuses once again.  Why?

Oh, I know the official reason.  Profits are up, and therefore these executives are to be compensated for playing a part in obtaining those profits.  But then again, the entire country played a part, last year and the year before, in rescuing the financial community from the results of its excessively reckless pursuit of profit at any cost.

At the same time, unemployment is hovering close to ten percent nationally, and it’s likely in excess of fifteen percent if you count in the people who aren’t included because they’ve been out of work so long they’ve given up looking.  Those figures don’t really include people who are working part-time because they can’t get full-time jobs, and the unemployment rate for minorities is close to twice the overall rate.  Even once-secure high-paying professions are feeling the pinch.  Law firms are booting out partners and aren’t hiring.  Thousands upon thousands of law school graduates have no jobs and student loans that can amount to $100,000 and more.  The fees paid to primary care doctors – you know, the ones who actually see you – are essentially frozen, while insurance and other costs continue to rise.  And unlike specialists, primary care physicians don’t rake in the big bucks.  Middle management jobs are continuing to shrink, as are positions for teachers all across the country.  And, as for us authors, paperback book sales are down, and ebook sales haven’t yet, if they ever do, made up the difference in royalties.

And the finance community is going to pay record bonuses?

For what?  Are banking services improving?  Not when banks are automating everything and trying to use as few real bodies as possible.  Not when they’ve grown ever more adept at finding fees for everything and reducing the billing cycle.  And now, my wife has discovered yet another indication of just how little the banks care about you and me.

The other day, she was trying to balance her account – and it wouldn’t balance.  The reason it wouldn’t balance was because the bank deducted $253 from her account for a check she wrote for $153.  Even the bank’s photocopied records showed that the check was for $153 – but they still deducted $253.  When she finally got a real person on the line, after a ten minute hold because “we are experiencing unusually high call volume,” and explained the situation, it took five minutes more to verify that the bank had goofed, and then the customer service [this is service?] representative explained that it would take 3-5 business days to rectify the error in my wife’s account.  Three to five days in this era of instant electronic banking?  When they made the error in the first place?  Oh… and when this isn’t your local bank but a large regional bank?

Would they have rescinded all the fees they would have collected if their error had caused her to overdraw her account?  I have my doubts.

So… tell me again how all those finance types deserve record bonuses?  They’re either totally out of touch with the rest of the United States… or they’re so contemptuous that they don’t care.  Either way, they don’t deserve those bonuses.

I just read a review of a recently released movie, and since I haven’t seen the film, and may not, I can’t say how accurate the review is, but one line of the review struck me as particularly relevant, especially in view of my previous blog.  That line said approximately, “You can’t tell whose movie this is, the star’s, the co-star’s, or the supporting actors’.”  From the rest of the review it was quite obvious that there was no confusion about the story lines or who was doing what to whom or why.  What the reviewer was stating was that he wanted the movie to emphasize without a doubt which story was the predominant one, and to make every one else subservient.

My question to the reviewer is:  “Why?”  Have viewers become so simple-minded that they can’t enjoy intersecting story lines, and the fact that at one time one part of a story becomes more dominant and that at another time another character and part do?

Certainly, life is like that, and much as we’d all like to be the center of attention and action, no one always is, not even the most powerful and most famous among us. Or is it that we feel our own lives are so complicated that we can only enjoy a movie when it’s straightforward and simple.

Or is it that, while many of us enjoy complex movies, more and more the media pundits and critics want to oversimplify matters for us.  That’s definitely been the case among the political analysts and the media talking heads who report on national politics.  It’s become the case with the economic “analysts” who present such data in the national general media.

As I’ve noted more than a few times before, we live in a highly technological society, and such societies are anything but simple.  And, in a riff on that theme, perhaps that’s really the gulf between the United States and many of the fundamentalist Mid-East cultures.  They want to hang on to the comforting simplicity and clarity of their traditional past, and can see all too well that such clarity vanishes in the conflicts of a modern technological society.  For that matter, even within the United States, that conflict exists, although so far, despite the horrible events in Arizona earlier this month, the violence around political events has been largely confined to verbal outbursts, despite the growing [until last week]intemperance of both media and political types.

And this movie’s review may well have bothered me because it’s yet another symptom of the conflict between “comforting” and clear traditional simplicity and modern complexity.  The problem with those old traditional clarities is that they cover up a multitude of injustices and prejudices under the guise of morality, rather than striving for a better ethical code, and one more suited to a technological society. Like it or not, until we can juggle those complexities better, and in an overall improved ethical fashion, we’re going to have problems, and all the entertainment that regales us with comforting simplicities won’t help in the slightest, just as the majority of the “popular” literature at the end of the 19^th century did little to prepare Americans for the need for the changes required in a developing technological society.