Information

The “information system” should provide understanding, which is needed for the practice of good citizenship. But it is not working well. This started with the rise of advertising in the late 19th century, when industrial output rose so dramatically that consumers had to be persuaded – on the basis of impulses and sentiments – to buy what they wanted rather than what they needed. When this sort of talk became obviously effective, public relations emerged to make businessmen, like Rockefeller, look good, and then, during World War I, propaganda was used to make the government look less warlike than the nasty “Huns.” Thus a powerful language of selling was introduced into American life, preferring efficacy rather than Enlightenment standards of truth, veracity, and reason. Scholarly explanations for how this all worked started with Marshall McCluhan who said that each “medium” – such as books or the telegraph – controls what kind of messages we can transmit. Then Neil Postman pointed out that the medium of commercial television will “amuse us to death” by ignoring our real needs in favor of peddling profitable wants. Thus Postman alerted us to how, since he wrote, getting our attention via slippery language has become the dominant business model for corporations today and has corrupted the marketplace for ideas.