The networks of social movements: McLuhan and Foucault
Chapter 2 of "Our Media in Motion: how social life became marketing strategy and relationships became fiction".
In the last years of college, I found myself in a particularly challenging situation. While the undergraduate research was something I wanted to do, incentivized by colleagues and my partner, I knew I wasn’t going to have much excitement or feel like my work was socially relevant if I focused on Phonology. So I came out of a high-mark test being handed out to me and had a conversation with my Phonology professor, Deusa Passos. I said that I had worked previously with a bulk of conversational data, and I thought that was interesting, but somehow I wanted to do that with the internet, because I saw an opportunity and I also thought it was pretty urgent. That was in 2011, more than a decade before ChatGPT.
But as I started my project, things got a little complicated. I accumulated tasks at work, teaching English in a school that had a “discursive approach”, focusing on the business clients who were all older and very rarely a college student who had just gotten in, but was definitely paying. On the side, I tried to play in a band that had been making me busy on the weekends at least since 2005, where we played covers of Japanese rock songs; but this time, our singer wanted to write songs in Japanese, having studied the language, and also wanted us to have a website, being a designer. But we had just learned of our previous singer’s suicide, and we didn’t know whether or not we’d continue with music, but we had to continue with something.
The first thing my academic advisor told me to do was study Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish philosopher who talked, among other things, about the tensions between freedom and security in the digital world. But the more eye-catching thing was that he teased audiences with his book titles, famously in “Liquid Modernity”. We were all going with the flow, but sometimes that was on a personal, selfish level and taken a little too literally in terms of liquidity, which is the best thing I can say in a book format.
After these Phonology classes, I’d be introduced to the study of Discourse, an area of Linguistics. The main authors were Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian refugee whose ideas were published by someone else, and Michel Foucault, mainstream French philosophy author who went from writing The History of Sexuality to Discipline and Punish, an attempt to explain social order and State controls. Not included in the bibliography of classic literature was 1984, a fiction novel which explores social control but reimagines it, with widely criticized metaphors like the Ministry of Love, but we did study how to write good text from essays published by the author George Orwell. Bauman was supposed to be the connection: I was living in a city that had majorly polluted rivers, and studying liquid love while thinking about control. What about lack of control? Because someone needed to ask the basic question: who polluted these rivers?
And we come to the question of media being a broad circulation format of role-models, and society witnessing reactions to how stories were presented and the need to represent reality with more rawness, boldness, realism. Film used to have a certain set of acceptable or unacceptable language and themes; a lot changed over the years, and you just can’t compare The Sound Of Music with Pulp Fiction. In a similar way, though that’s a bit of a risky thing to say next, you can’t compare mass consumption of pornography and the evening news, which are a retrospect of government decisions and maybe sports. But these things show connections which people fail to see, but they know exist. Whose job is it to analyze such relationships?
They made this brilliant concept of data. Your internet history would be registered, and suddenly, in the two first decades of the 2000s, everyone said that “what happens on the internet stays on the internet”. But that was a cautionary tale. They wanted us to behave, but secretly, there was some reverse engineering going on -- otherwise, the consumption analytics wouldn’t have been so controversial. When it comes to “polluted environments”, we have to collectively think that we have looked for the immediate rewards and the positive sensations that sexuality representations have brought us, but there was another thing going on: a technology transformation, because this already existed on VHS and its industry -- the hidden section of Blockbuster, if you will. Now, nothing’s hidden. And we’re supposed to campaign for a cleaner environment, while everyone wants to take a tour and the places leading there emit a lot of carbon -- if that makes sense as a metaphor.
Of course, we don’t want people to know that’s what we’re doing. Mainly, because we don’t always do -- unless that’s an actual behavioral pattern observed and, well, analyzed by marketing agencies and tech companies who share data with them. We’re only beginning to review that, but in legislation: that means boring discussions, not blunt conversation bridging the gaps that we’ve seen in how people grew up and what they were accustomed to. Personally, I had my ups and downs in terms of how I related with these “high carbon emission zones”. For many, these are the biggest cities in the world; but we’re not talking about cities, it’s about the human body being exposed and what’s being recorded, with whose authorization and supervision to ensure safety.
There’s a sort of cruel trade-off with the mass adoption of social media, and let’s never forget that porn sites are not in this category, unless proven otherwise. There are, currently, gray areas: a big adult performer may be present on social media among politicians, institutions, meme pages and the like. And that is, to say the least, problematic. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and try to lay the paths to which we can go when we’re on a stage of tackling problems, consultation open to the general audience: we are choosing between private or public, but that’s a choice between acceptance of aggressive and invasive marketing or apparently, minimally peaceful interaction with our chosen social circle, while on the web. The terms of the trade-off are false premises: you agree to the use and exploration of your data, like your real-time location (an urgent issue to tackle) and the lack of cryptography on your private communication; but even when it’s cryptographed, which means nobody will be able to read it but yourself and the person with whom you interact, there are daily copies being made -- that’s what’s happening on WhatsApp. So what do we want: privacy or publicity? And what’s more or less advantageous -- are we thinking about that?
Two thinkers can help us elaborate on that apparent conundrum: Foucault and McLuhan. One of them studies not privacy, but surveillance: Foucault writes about this idea of panopticon in his most famous publication, Discipline and Punish. But it comes after very grim descriptions of how the centuries before us, not so long ago in fact, treated those who, let’s put it this way, behaved badly. That’s not accurate in terms of what the chapter devoted to the birth of prison describes: a man kills his own mother, and has a physical punishment that will lead him to death described in detail at the opening of the book. I’m not sure if Foucault was particularly fond of all mothers, but it seemed that the gravity of the crime was not taken into account; the punishment was. But because that is way too graphic, I’ll ask you to read what the philosopher wrote, in 1975 -- what a coincidence, the year Microsoft was founded!
It seems that the human brain can be explored up to a certain extent; after that, we need support from other sources. The 10 trillion connections that make up the mass of our thinking organ will search for other connections when it’s done trying to solve a practical problem. Computers came to rescue. And so the question of what we did on those computers was suddenly an issue to worry about. Foucault, on the other hand, was analyzing the justice system in the eighteenth century. Again, not so long ago. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, he writes, things started to change, and physical punishment was no longer adopted. In his words: "Punishment went from an art of unbearable sensations to an economy of suspended rights".
When it comes to the United States, this is what we find on Wikipedia:
[The country] is ranked highly on human rights by various organizations. For example, the Freedom in the World index lists the United States in the highest category for human freedom in civil and political rights, with 83 out of 100 points as of 2021; the Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, puts the U.S. in the highest category of countries with a "satisfactory situation", the Democracy Index, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, classifies the United States as a "flawed democracy". Despite its high rankings, human rights issues still arise.
But then, there are more than 20 countries above the United States when it comes to respect to Human Rights, a matter that certainly concerned Michel Foucault. Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor he famously debated, not knowing the video would make it to the most popular on YouTube, at least among Humanities students, proposes that “human nature” is determined by data collection. This, to him, is a “slightly technical approach”. Every concept or the knowledge an adult person has is the fruit of the types of experiences he or she has had through the course of life insofar. The ability to use this complex compilation and apply it to life in general and the actions taken, including the language used, will be part of human nature, according to Chomsky. Foucault picks up on the point presented in the beginning, and proposes a different idea: if you look at biology, human nature has been a concept studied and transformed through the latest centuries as the idea of life. He grows in the debate. If we don’t even know what life is, why are we focusing on language, and furthermore, why do we keep talking about “collection of data” to describe human nature?
If we observe the debates that happened after social media established itself, after the mass adoption of the personal computer and the transition from desktop to mobile, we’ll see that this “data” concept took on new meanings. Data is suddenly your home address, next to your blood type and medication prescriptions, on a system that doctors can access. It’s also who you talked to last night, and what videos you were watching, from what device and what location in the world, but maybe that location was simulated in order to disguise the data collection process. Under these circumstances, your biological self will come to play, and eventually you’re going to be required to say who you are as well as what your intentions are -- that, let’s not forget, with the surveillance apparatus monitoring your activity, something that Foucault predicted, but Chomsky paid more attention to in terms of how computers could perform tasks. The questions of why surveillance exists will be explored later in this book, and it’s not running away from the debate: it’s a question that has more to do with the social interpretations of the role of authorities and the movements against control of media and its history.
If we asked, then, a person like the multi-enterprise owner Elon Musk how he sees data, we might get something like “machine learning is useless 99.9% of the time”. And he’s the guy who’s responsible for tackling the biggest issues in data science: we need to understand the data to save the environment from more potential disasters and we need to understand social conversations simming through the data and finding solutions to user experience, which he seems more devoted to in comparison to his other enterprises (Tesla, the electric vehicle company, earns him the most money), like exploring space. It seems interesting to compare the moment when Foucault was caught watching a monologue in English about human nature as data, and think that human nature is to Musk the ability to explore, but at the same time he wants to control the exploration (by suspending user rights on his platform Twitter/X, and also going to Mars while the focus should be on renewables and a transformation of the economy, and without mentioning that he’s not the best communicator around).
On the other hand, communication was the main interest of Marshall McLuhan. He argues that mass media recomposed education, for many reasons: the informative aspects, real-time explanations, analyses, debates broadcast for all while we relied not even on books, but teacher instruction on a basic level, when it was even possible to be delivered. And it matters to talk about education when we talk about the history of media, or rather, how our lives were motioned by these transformations, and what we ourselves learned in the process. The author predicted that Schools of Communication would be the new change-makers of the educational system, because of their reach and available technologies.
The question of being outside of a system in order to see the changes which have happened or will happen is crucial to understand near pathologies of social media use today, where people have opinions from within, but not outside of their scope. McLuhan wasn’t thinking about surveillance, for example. He wouldn’t propose, but maybe a student would, that the written word was merely a thought in the digital environment; many, of course, would argue against that, but these would likely be the defendants, if not the proponents, of widespread surveillance, of global proportions.
To McLuhan:
"Every activity of development is, in fact, a globalization of behavior (integralness, diversification and engagement), on the contrary of what behaviorists say (partialization, specialization and conditioning). (...) Only the goals enriched with possibilities, treated with creative intent [unlike Pavlov and Skinner], will lead the psychological activity to a globalization of the atomized information."
It seems that McLuhan would like this globalization of behavior to happen, in order for the media to reign -- but did he predict the role of new technologies? Foucault would argue that it’s through a system of norms that need to be followed that we maintain social order, but what about free will? And Chomsky, bridging Linguistics and technology studies, would not see what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking about when he decided to make a data center of faces, but if he knew, he would condemn it -- while maybe failing to see a new appeal in the marketplace of ideas, and in the mind of people accustomed to technology innovations being offered from time to time; that is to say, a demand for them.
As far as McLuhan is concerned, he didn’t predict the Creator Economy. But he called on “immediatism” to be scrutinized. Everyone knows that social interactions today carry a lot of false premises and misinterpretations, but it’s through them that we move on with our lives. Ignoring questions of privacy, we choose to publicize ourselves as somewhat our best version, and then try to establish connections, even if the briefest, with people across the globe. The culture clashes are not happy occasions, but they are now expected; in the world of business, however, everything is predicted with accuracy and efficiency, because they labeled data, using Chomsky’s terminology, to explain what was happening to social interactions. But we haven’t yet explored what it means, emotionally speaking, to let go of your right to privacy -- one of the rights that, if suppressed, makes a person feel imprisoned, in light of Foucault’s panopticon and tech company surveillance and power -- in order to simply live life. It seems, the debate between Foucault, who insisted that we haven’t even begun to understand life, and Chomsky, who had an entire theory of how language, as our finest invention or possession, works, is interesting to be looked at with more criticism.
McLuhan is not too broad: if we see the phenomenon of mass media as an educational leap, commentator Mauro Lima adds:
"Educating is not anymore predicting social needs, but preparing the youth to the unpredictable (...) replacing the emphasis on the curriculum with the emphasis on techniques [in the pseudo-scientific immediatism of the economists].”
These techniques involve blocking, reporting, flagging, but also banning and suspending, on the other side. Something that gets talked about very seldom is what people call “shadow-banning”: the user is present in the platform, but has no visibility, on purpose. The most obvious clue to find out if they are indeed is that, if you search for them and the name is not suggested, then it’s definitely shadow-banned; but there are algorithmic manipulations and things like “good reputation” with platforms that determine how well an account will perform in terms of numbers.
I did some digging. It seems that “reputation” isn’t a term people want to discuss outside of the world of marketing. That is precisely the headline. In the academic world, however, there are people interested. The Second European Conference on Social Media of Portugal, which happened in 2015, gave space to researchers Eman Alshawaf from Kuwait University and Le Wen, from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities to talk about the concept, and cite a case study of Starbucks and Nike. Among the formal passages, is something that made me raise an eyebrow:
“What enhances the promotional experience on Instagram is the co-creation process that occurs when individuals interact with a commercial account on Instagram; individuals now use brands to promote themselves—in a new opportunity to reverse the conventional relationship.”
But we don’t co-create. We’re consuming content from traditional media, which adapted to social media, and following people who paid for visibility. This is well-known as of 2023. Also, the experience of interacting with commercial accounts may not be positive at all: my promotion of the application to meet friends Wink led to a Google Play ban of the platform; my Google reviews transformed the city’s businesses arguably for the worse. And the manual of ethics says you say good things about the brand to get a like and a reply with an emoji -- nothing like co-creating or taking a stake in the company’s business. The brands that people may use to promote themselves are not brands: they’re urban spaces, which can be tagged, but also commercial places, which can contribute to reputation and that might be a valid point; but culture says that’s just tacky. It’s the old story: nobody wants to see pictures of your food. But they post photos at the gym, at the zoo, at concerts and this implies that there’s a relationship with the “brand”/business owners, but it’s not in equal measure. Users may want to seek leverage by tagging themselves with these other accounts, but what do we learn in terms of identity?
It would be much more interesting to say you had a nice time in a festival, and then tag your favorite artists, to thank them. People do that, and get their posts reposted by bands and the like. This also happens with brands. But imagine a situation where there’s real “co-creation”, as in a balanced visibility case, for example, when someone posts a selfie and you share the picture on today’s Instagram Stories, complimenting them and saying how much you like them. That is co-creation. And that is fun. But who are those people? Are they your friends? What’s at stake when you do that? And more importantly, but also less importantly: will they even see what you did?
The process of participating on social media is supposed to be fun. And so a lot of educational models need to reassess the fun in letting go of certain private life ideals, where nobody knows what’s happening with you besides your loved ones, and accepting, as data suggests, that you love a whole bunch of people, and what you share is out of a caring for them all. McLuhan points out:
"It's a mistake to think there's a basic difference between education and fun. This distinction only exhumes people from inquiring deeply on the subject. It's the same as establishing a distinction between didactical poetry and lyrical poetry, under the premise that one teaches while the other entertains. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases will teach in a much more effective way."
The poets on the internet, however, are nowhere to be found. Maybe look on Tumblr -- I myself have a blog -- and you’ll find some interesting thoughts. The Poetry Foundation is an interesting website, but in terms of publicizing thoughts and making them products for consumption (not a matter of intimacy and revelation of inner thought, or rather, sharing and allowing co-creation as it should be, not just for the sake of the money machine’s purposes), motivationals may carry poetic messages, often following by an image. This is currently happening on Threads, Meta’s competitor to Twitter/X, but the trend goes back a long time.
If we assume that mass media is a phenomenon of order and discipline, we forget that it has educational value. We begin to see not the good intentions, but the bad: profiting over people’s illnesses and distresses. This “data” that is being collected, part of human nature, is what makes a text worth reading; we know it before we read. And we end up, let’s admit, not reading anything at all. The time spent scrolling to find something interesting is far exceeding the time spent actually reading articles; and X wants to reduce that time even more, so that the platform itself can be used alone to deliver all the news. It’s a bet on the banning of reading, just like they’re betting on the banning of books in Florida and we all revisit the moments in history when this happened; but the unsaid is that editorials “ban” commentary all the time, for commercial purposes.
The excesses of social media were also predicted by McLuhan, if we understand how it plays a role in education (and we’ll discuss how education plays a role in media):
"Piaget shows us how the 'morals of demand' are opposed to the 'morals of cooperation', one as an heteronomic imposition and another as the flowering of automomy. Thus, the school has been promoting an alienation that can lead to schizophrenia. The measure of authenticity in the schooling process, as McLuhan reminds us, is the total mobilization of the individual in a task. Verifying learning should be verifying the entire mobilization and creative energy of the youth."
If cooperation fosters autonomy, then the conversations we’re having on social media are an attempt to build a movement of thought -- our media in motion. The people we meet, the events in our lives, the places we visit, the songs we listen to, the times we have sex, the times we work until late, the articles we read and share, the thoughts we write down in a moment of difficulty: all that is our media, and it should be ours for real; but platforms demand a certain standardization of content, and then, McLuhan explains, that can have serious consequences. The schizophrenic user is just being exposed to way too many things at the same time. The cooperation becomes the voices in your head: because there's hatred and rage, all you think about is that; you can’t go to your comfort zone, because the basic right to have that comfort zone was suspended the moment you de-standardized your contributions at will. You took on that risk, now you should handle the consequences.
Before Instagram, there used to be a social network where teens were interacting more called Gifyo. Its tagline gives inspiration to this book: “your life in motion”. It was just not common to have any gifs on the internet, and because the file size was acceptably low and they could be posted as comments, they gained popularity (until the point where there were all kinds of stickers on WhatsApp and a whole list of reaction gifs, particularly on Twitter, but later on Facebook as well). The network showed some artists who liked to draw (a characteristic Tumblr shared), but also people who explored aesthetics both in the furniture and lighting of their own homes, the outside and the inside, so to speak: they showed their bodies very frequently. Moderators were slow. We assume, because nobody ever talked about Gifyo despite it being a definitive precursor of Instagram, that what was in place prevented basic indecency and shocks to the audience, also with respect to violence and themes like self-harm; but there were breasts and bottoms, and more actual vaginas and penises being displayed on the home page, a self-updating index of all user contributions. The thing is that you could click, and see who the person was, and follow them, and read their bio, and message. People took notice. The network, after a few years, stopped most of the explicit porn on it, but Tumblr was having its peak. Then, of course, Instagram’s Terms of Use became the standard of the web.
It matters to say that teenagers have the right to express themselves sexually. Sexuality is something we all develop as teens, and it just happened to be that technology was invented in this or that decade to be able to register moments where this is being explored and present you with a constant reminder, but Snapchat, for instance, eliminated that concept from the beginning: despite controversy over the use of GPS and spams, messages, photos and videos sent are automatically deleted either immediately after being seen or 24 hours later. This model, it seems, gained people’s trust. It became the most popular messaging app in America, and people seem to be happy with it, to the point of creating other apps that let you find friends for Snapchat -- and in the end, interact with thousands a day, explicitly, like Gifyo but on your phone and laying in bed alone. I met some people on Snapchat, but I’ll never forget the people I met on Gifyo, a site where I tried to be just a guy with long hair who was interested in reading. I said: “don’t judge a book by its cover”, and showed a copy of Gogol, a Russian author. It turns out a Russian chick started to follow me after that, and we exchanged thoughts about music for a few years, until the war came and things got weird.
But in terms of how teenagers express themselves, we should be able to present them with role models, and that’s a complicated task in terms of marketing. Content creators are, after all, people involved in marketing; and it seems that, while everyone assumes but also ignores that we all became content creators, the tools we have for making good contributions to the web -- or rather, contributions recognized as good, which may be a completely different thing -- are scarce for the many and top notch for the few. We may think that we have an audience in mind, but nothing guarantees the success of our venture in putting out creative work, a somehow grim perspective that social media companies try to mask with massive offerings of content. If all of this is being created, then who am I compared to these people?
It turns out that a lot of that has to do with how you identify yourself, which is more than your bio, and whatever links you choose or not to attach to it, but most commonly usernames. A distinct username seems to be not just proof that you’re real -- Tumblr aside -- but also an indicator that you thought things through and you have a good sense of humor (which, in case you’ve checked out my previous work, matters quite a bit). But we’re in the age of debating whether or not we should intervene when teenagers or pre-teens (since literal kids are not allowed to use the internet and search for interaction, which might pose a risk in terms of mental health and also safety and well-being) start using slurs which we are definitely not “too cool” to normalize, like the N word. Suddenly, we’re facing a real case of rampant racism, and that’s a little bit of the tip of the iceberg kind of scenario, because it starts like that, and then it spreads. A teenager already has strong opinions about the web and its players, with a series of skills they have mastered, some of them because of school, but others in spite of things like restrictive terms of use.
While certain things remain taboo in our society, the tensions between freedom and security are certainly there, but we have to teach about this sooner and think of strategies to manage social lives which are supposed to prepare you for college, where the mind is pushed to the limit, and work, where who you are determines how successful you’re going to be. A 13 year old has no idea what any of this is about, but they still want to talk to strangers. The mechanisms for finding people on the web need to get better urgently, but with a reasonable standard that says that age and geolocation are somehow flexible, which is not what the makers of Hoop or Wink agreed upon, and the reason is debatable (they ask for money to make it possible to be friends with more new people, which is pretty much unethical). But for every rule, there’s a reason. If social media transparency is taken seriously, we shouldn’t have a problem and the tendency is for collaboration to thrive and communities to spread positivity and support of their members; but it matters to look at what exactly these communities are: teachers, traders, tech bros, masters of coaching, our new LinkedIn connection from the Middle East, lovers of pets, lovers of big breasts?
The ability to distinguish between the social and the individual is like giving someone a free optometrist appointment and a new pair of glasses. You look from the outside and you think: “this is actually public? Maybe I shouldn’t say this.” On the other hand, the last decade has been marked by data breach scandals and cryptocurrency schemes where people stole information and allegedly got rich from it. It’s useful to take caution, but also to educate yourself so as to being able to have a clear message in every medium that you participate in; but if psychology is indeed the most disputed spot in the academic world, we need to assess how productivity can turn into not just profit, but a rested mind and a joyful experience on the web, probably with fewer things to do than we think we need. In a tentative pun, to look and to focus are not the same thing, but it’s not a question that there are many looks and things to focus on; it’s a question of not focusing as a right and looking as a deep desire -- which is an issue that relates to each individual user’s privacy and habits. In turn, everyone should be able to disconnect and not keep coming back to the platforms, but actually pay attention to the world. In this complex environment, social movements like rising from the poor to the middle class involve a lot more than taking a good picture for Instagram, but I think we’ve learned that already.