Let's get emotional until we die

At the end of the Telenotícies of any given day, the TV3 news anchor tells us that on the channel's digital platform we will be able to find, in the format of audiovisual pills, the news stories that have most “excited” us as viewers. She does not say what has most “interested” us, as she perhaps would have done a few years ago. Now, definitively, the goal is to excite the viewer, a passive subject par excellence, even if this contradicts the statement that, pompously, we were told would characterize the new news programs of the Catalan public television: “Inform. Explain. Understand.” Despite some meritorious efforts to maintain informative rigor, communication seems increasingly destined for the purpose of bringing out emotions before reflections. And if only this evil were limited to “ours,” but it is to be feared that it is quite widespread.

To verify this, it has been enough, even before the election campaign itself began, with the noise generated by the appearance of an extreme-right politician on a program of the Spanish public television, in which the host played (badly) with the confusion between information and humor, with the predictable result of a monumental mess. Needless to say, the program had a sensational audience, and it has monopolized the debate –let us be magnanimous in the qualifier– in the subsequent days. The news is no longer what the guest politician said, which is what should seriously worry us, but whether or not he will go to another program (let’s call it a podcast) made by a self-proclaimed influencer to whom this newspaper has attributed the merit, not a small one, of “being able to tip the elections” (sic).

I am deeply concerned by the demiurgic power we attribute to these forms of communication, which our politicians are the first to encourage: do they really believe that going to explain how many times they sleep together a week will help them win any votes? Is that what will make them closer to the citizens? Do they have so little regard for us? Everything seems to indicate that politicians have fallen into the trap of the algorithm, and have concluded that to get closer to the voters it is not necessary to expand the forms of political participation, making it more democratic, but to entrust everything to the amplifying and simplifying power of social networks, that great tool for mass control and manipulation that we have embraced as uncritically as we have known how. Networks that, as a friend of mine says, are based on two basic aspects of the human condition: exhibitionism, on one side, and voyeurism, on the other.

A number of years ago, an American critic and pedagogue, Neil Postman, published a book titled, in the Catalan translation, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think that at one time it was given as reading to journalism students in the faculties of the field, but I see that there are no recent reprints. Perhaps because Postman's book, originally published in 1985, refers to another historical moment, although not so far from the current one, which coincides with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, an actor who had made his own the motto that "politics is the same as show business". Postman wondered "what we are laughing at and why we have stopped thinking" and addressed his answer to the way television had adopted the codes of entertainment, transforming politics, education, journalism, science, and religion in a drastic way. A student of McLuhan and a professor at NYU, Postman was particularly concerned about the impact of new technologies on education. It is no coincidence that his first book was titled Teaching as a subversive activity, where he advocated a teaching method based on asking questions and avoiding short and simple answers. But he also realized that it was necessary for the school to act, above all, as a counterweight to a popular culture dominated by television, and highlighted the need for an education based on literacy. That is to say, in that sequence that quite recently, right here, Gregorio Luri summarized in four verbs: "To speak, to read, to write, to think".

When Donald Trump was elected, for the first time, president of the United States, an article from the New York Timesstated that, when you have turned the elections into a three-ring circus, you should not be surprised that a clown gets elected. The current media circus could not be more of a reminder of where we are headed in the next elections, with the aggravating factor, moreover, that we now know that the chosen clowns do not, precisely, make people laugh.