Don't Blame the Messenger

Fiddling with social media while Rome burns

“Blame the messenger.”  “The Media is the message.”

Critiques of social media are actually surprisingly comforting.   Nothing it seems is wrong with our society except that the messengers have brought us discordant messages and thus we are fragmented and partisan. 

Except for social media we would be cooking smores by the fire and singing folk songs, Jimmy Crack Corn for example.    

It’s interesting that so popular a critique could be so fundamentally soothing. 

I hear “Kill the Messenger” as a fashionable corrective, social psychology’s McLuhan moment.   

It is an age old trick to redirect attention away from the causes of a fire and onto the performance of the fire. 

I grant that there are consequences to our popular forms of messaging. They enhance performance and weaken the “social fabric.” 

But remember that the fabric is often a skein of lies that justify inequality and suffering, that retard progress and cast protectors of the ordinary as Super Heroes. 

I can’t say this strongly enough.  Don’t join the wrong battle.  We have political-economic-social systems that can’t bear the weight of today’s powerful forces. Look at the Sudan, if you have already anesthetized yourself again the horror of War in Ukraine. 

I had a painting by Harry Melroy that showed a person with a flyswatter running in circles in a setting of monsters.  I need to bring it out these days and find a place on the wall.