Source and Copyright : James Marriott. Times Newspapers.
See below a Times Newspaper article written by an
excellent up and coming journalist called James Marriott. James has his own
unique style of writing which is very representative of a younger social media influenced
approach to topical subjects. It has raw honesty and tackles issues in an
upfront manner whilst retaining some delicate humour. Although a Times
Journalist, so one assumes reasonably well paid, he obviously experience’s
first hand the tough economic reality of working and living in London, United
Kingdom. In truth I normally like to always add my own views on the subjects
these articles cover but I have to admit that in Jame’s case he does such a
good job that there is very little I can add or challenge without detracting
from the messages he very effectively communicates.
James
Marriot Times Newspaper Article
The most depressing news of the past week was not that
the Chinese state may be using TikTok to steal the data of our top journalists,
civil servants and MPs but that so many of them had downloaded the app in the
first place. The revelation that the country is run by an elite that has
voluntarily submitted itself to a cultural diet of inane viral dancing and
lip-sync videos is enough to turn one into a populist of positively Trumpian
fervour.
TikTok is deservedly acquiring a sinister reputation. But
the greatest political threat the app poses is not to the private data of
government officials but to our minds. Its frenetic algorithmic video feed
represents a gear change in the accelerating inanition of our political
culture. This is not to grouchily denounce the latest new fangled thing the
kids are doing, but to acknowledge that the successful functioning of a
democracy benefits from mental habits associated with a literate society.
Liberal democracy is the creation of a literary culture.
The birth of modern democracy in the 19th century coincided with the advent of
mass literacy. Our democratic institutions are the products of a society in
which the values of print culture were ascendant. The principle of the free
press requires that political argument is carried out at length in newspapers,
magazines and books.
Parliamentary debate began as a form of what has been
called “printed orality” — ie debaters addressed one another with the length
and complexity of written texts.
The media theorist Neil Postman pointed out that the
American founding fathers assumed that “mature citizenship was not conceivable
without sophisticated literacy”. It was taken for granted by the pioneers of
modern democracy that the success of the system depended on a culture in which
citizens possessed certain distinctively literary virtues: the ability to
concentrate on complex ideas, to critically evaluate arguments, to pay
sustained attention to an opponent’s arguments and to cultivate empathy with
different points of view.
Students can no longer engage with a
difficult book like Middlemarch
It is often said that smartphones are “rewiring” our
brains but neuroscience suggests that it is books not phones that most
intriguingly alter the mind. “Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and
hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of
what’s going on around us as possible,” writes Nicholas Carr in his book The
Shallows. The deep, uninterrupted concentration fostered by print is a “strange
anomaly in the history of our psychological development”.
Reading creates empathy too: brain scans show that
“readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative”. The
material does not have to be intimidatingly highbrow.
Engagement with any long text cultivates “silence,
solitude, and contemplative attitudes”, the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein writes.
Carr says: “Whether a person is immersed in a bodice
ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same.”
Now that sales of fiction are in long-term decline and
Instagram is the most popular source of news for teenagers, the political benefits
of a print culture are imperilled. We are increasingly reluctant to engage with
complex texts. One university lecturer I spoke to recently said she had
resigned herself to the fact that she would never again teach George Eliot’s
novel Middlemarch. Her students are no longer able to engage with such a long
and difficult book.
Another academic tells me he habitually approaches
classic texts through their TV adaptations.
For a while, the popularity of Twitter, Facebook and
blogs seemed to represent the survival of at least an etiolated form of
literary culture.
In fact, digital media is becoming more visual and less
literate. Image based apps such as TikTok and Instagram cannot even support
debates of the quality of Twitter.
Politics on such sites is carried out through assertion
rather than argument. Slogans and political memes such as the blacked-out
Instagram squares that were supposed to advance the cause of anti-racism at the
height of the Black Lives Matter movement or the ubiquitous twee cartoons of the
Queen that accompanied her death are symptoms of a public discourse approaching
the level of mere propaganda. MPs no longer worry how their speeches will
appear printed in newspapers the next day but whether a sassy or outraged clip
a few seconds long might go viral online.
Literary culture is inherently liberal. The solitary
reader is an individualist engaged in the reasoned contemplation of different
ideas and perspectives. The increasingly visual culture of social media is
fundamentally illiberal, promoting groupthink and trivia. In Britain, the most
online generations are the ones most sceptical of democracy.
Liberal democracy is not an inevitable political fact. It
is the product of particular historical and cultural circumstances. If this
sounds alarmist, reflect on the trajectory of the world’s democracies since the
launch of the iPhone in 2007. Or consider the historic hostility of autocratic
and totalitarian states to books. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany silenced their
best writers and thinkers because it is not just subversive ideas that are
threatening to autocrats but the very habit of complex thought itself. Social
media in China is a frivolous confection of animal videos and dance trends. There
is little debate. It is better for the regime that way.
And as for western democracies? Well, we do not yet know
how easy it is to run one in a culture that prizes the viral video over the
book.
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