The Rise of Celebrity Politics

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election was a shock to many—myself included. Afterward, however, I couldn’t help but notice this electoral upset fit an emerging pattern I’ve seen most of my life. As a child of the 1980s, I grew up in the Reagan Era, when the U.S. elected and reelected the first movie star as commander in chief.

The first election I voted in was in 1998, when I watched another movie star, pro wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura, win the governorship in my home state of Minnesota.

Later, in the 2000s, I saw actor Arnold Schwarzenegger become governor of California. Shortly after, former Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken rose to the Senate (again, in my home state). I suppose it only made sense a reality TV personality and social media star would win highest office next.

Like Reagan, Ventura, Schwarzenegger, and Franken, Trump is a celebrity. He wasn’t the first, and he probably won’t be the last. So perhaps this celebrity status is key for understanding what’s happening in politics. In fact, that was the argument by an author whose books on media ecology have enjoyed renewed interest.

Media Ecology: the effects of media

Besides the obvious benefit of name recognition, why do celebrities have an advantage in politics? A plausible answer came from Neil Postman, an educator and author who founded a discipline called media ecology. Simply put, media ecology studies how new technologies or media affect the way we live and think.

Here’s the underlying argument. When we add a new technology to society, we don’t simply have society plus the new technology. Rather, we have a whole new society. That’s because adding new technology to culture affects our entire way of life, including how we perceive and understand information. In his book Technopoly, Postman explains why he uses the word “ecology” to describe the effects of technology and media this way.

I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment… This is how ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything (Postman, 1992, p 18).

(For science geeks familiar with chaos theory, the term media ecology resembles the phrase dynamical system: one change to a part creates ripples—or ‘butterfly effects’—that change the whole.)

Media Ecology and Politics

So, what does media ecology have to do with politics? According to Postman, the technological shift from print to screen media was a game changer. As society transitioned from journalistic newspapers and public dialogues (e.g., The New York Times, the Lincoln-Douglas debates) to cable news and digital soundbites (e.g., CNN, Trump’s Tweets), people consumed information more rapidly and less attentively.

In other words, television and social media condition our culture to think about news less in terms of deliberation and more in terms of entertainment. For instance, TV and Twitter encourage immediate reaction, flashy imagery, and, unfortunately, lots of online outrage. As a result, politics becomes more entertaining and outrageous. After all, if it isn’t great showbiz or infotainment, it loses TV ratings or Internet traffic.

The Message (or Metaphor) of Media

It’s a problem Postman dissects in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In it, he draws upon an aphorism by media scholar Marshall McLuhan:

the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964/2003, p 19).

In essence, McLuhan meant that media do more than communicate information. Media shape how we perceive and understand information.

A famous example during his time was the Kennedy-Nixon debate—the first presidential debate to air on live television. People who watched the debate on TV felt Kennedy won, while people who listened to the debate on radio thought Nixon won. Overall, Kennedy ‘looked’ better, which TV images magnified; but Nixon ‘sounded’ better, which radio waves amplified.

Building on this insight, Postman reworked McLuhan’s aphorism:

the medium is the metaphor (Postman, 1985, p 3).

What is the medium a metaphor for? Basically, for thought itself. To wit, different types of media augment different kinds of thinking. And different kinds of thinking shape the content and quality of culture and society, including politics.

Are We Amusing Ourselves to Death?

For this reason, Postman worried that if we let television, and now social media, dominate public discourse, politics would be more about style and less about substance. Consequently, instead of participating in democratic deliberation, we’d get lost in a sea of amusing distractions. As Postman warned,

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death (Postman, 1985, p 3-4, emphasis added).

What future leaders that’ll leave us with remains to be seen. And yet, one trend seems clear. Until we figure out how to curb the excesses of television and social media, pro wrestlers, actors, comedians, reality TV personalities, social media stars, and other celebrities will likely take over government.

No wonder McLuhan opined the following about television, though he could have said the same about social media.

Do you really want to know what I think about that thing. If you want to save one shred of Hebrao-Greco-Roman-Medieval-Renaissance-Enlightenment-Modern-Western civilization, you’d better get an ax and smash all the sets (Gordon, 1997, p 301).

References

Gordon, W. Terrence. (1997). Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding. New York: BasicBooks.

McLuhan, Marshall. (2003). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: Critical Edition. (W. Terrence Gordon, Ed.). Berkeley: Gingko Press. (Original work published 1964.)

Postman, Neil. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books.

Postman, Neil. (1982). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books.

Let me know if you’ve any thoughts on Postman or McLuhan’s ideas about media ecology, or explore other Educational Topics on this site.