Latest news with #MarshallMcLuhan
New Statesman
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Ignore the pessimists – we are living through a literary golden age
Photo by Adam Hirons / Millennium Images, UK Literary culture is dominated by pessimists. They claim that the English novel is in a slump, the media is dying at the hand of tech oligarchs, and that culture is in a repetitive doom-loop. Every film is a sequel. Students don't read anymore. A generation of graduates are illiterate. Marshall McLuhan was right. There is a lot of truth in this perspective. Survey data shows there really has been a decline in reading this century. Studying literature at university is in steep decline. No-one doubts that there is a preponderance of screen time instead of book time. It is heartbreaking to see children still in their buggies addicted to tablets. Somedays, I feel the pull of the pessimistic argument. What was the last English book that was as good as Piranesi or An Inheritance of Loss? Why do we not have a new Sally Rooney, or a Percival Everett every year? But I think the overall picture is more complicated. Literature is doing just fine in quality terms, but we are at a tipping point. We have a chance to change all this, and pessimism won't help. Let's start with fiction. The last few years have seen some splendid British novels: Piranesi, Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, Shuggie Bain, and the Wolf Hall books. This year I have especially enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay. And Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a very funny new novel. International fiction is thriving: South America, Ireland, Korea, Japan and France have all produced great novels recently. This year, Helen deWitt, a true genius, is publishing a new novel. In 2022, Tyler Cowen listed seventeen major novels of modern times and concluded that we are not living through an especially bad time for literature. There is also children's writing. Sam Leith wrote in 2022 'we're going through a bit of a golden age for children's fiction.' He named Katherine Rundell, Piers Torday, SF Said, Jeff Kinney, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Michelle Paver. There are also writers like Alex Bell, Frances Hardinge, and Julia Donaldson. The bestselling shelves for non-fiction, however, have recently been full of trash. The recent Times list of the bestselling books of the last 50 years was, to say the least, dispiriting. But we don't lack excellent non-fiction. AN Wilson has just written a very good book about Goethe. Frances Wilson's new biography of Muriel Spark is truly excellent, as is Lamora Ash's compulsive book about Christianity, and Helen Castor's new biography of Richard II and Henry IV. Rural Hours by Harriet Baker remains underrated despite winning the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. There is also Question 7, by Richard Flanagan, The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle, Parfit by David Edmonds, What We Owe The Future, by Will MacAskill. We should also be optimistic about the breadth and variety of what is happening online. Naomi Kanakia, an American novelist turned Substacker, has just had her work profiled in the New Yorker, along with John Pistelli, another Substacker whose new novel Major Arcana is a weird and wonderful account of modern culture. Kanakia has written about the many fictional experiments happening on Substack. Several critics and essayists have emerged on Substack whose work is interesting and original, people like Henry Belger, alongside the established writers like BD McClay. Hollis Robbins is an original and daring academic voice writing about AI. Closer to home, AN Wilson, England's last great man of letters in the George Henry Lewes manner, has a Substack too, which I read religiously. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe On any given day you can read first-rate nonfiction online in places like 'Construction Physics', 'Works in Progress', and from writers like Paul Graham, Noah Smith, and Scott Alexander. In Britain, there is excellent work being done by Saloni Dattani about science and Alice Evans about demography and women's rights. Are you not fascinated to know that Starbucks is a bank? Do you not admire Amia Srinivasan, Sophie Elmhirst, and Sam Knight? We have seen the tail end of a golden age of obituaries, too, notably at the Economist and Telegraph as well as at the New York Times. It is like the days of the periodical and Grub Street and the Westminster Review. This online culture has real signs of growth. There are now five million paying subscribers on Substack. Library apps like Libby are going through a small boom. BookTok is making all sorts of unexpected books, including classics, into bestsellers. In 2017 the UK publishing industry had revenues of £4.8bn. Now it is £7bn. There are far more independent bookshops now than in 2016 – 1,052 compared to 867. What we are starting to see, I think, is a tipping point. The decline of literature is coming to an end. The bounce back might be starting from a low point, but it's very real. On Substack, Beth Bentley has written about the popularity of reading in modern culture. Gen Z read more books than their elders, she reports. There are plenty of other signs that the decline is over. Celebrities and influences are running book clubs. One X user reported their builder listening to George Eliot on the scaffolding. Naomi Kanakia recently wrote about the growing fandom for literature on Substack among people who are disconnected from literary discourse and find it all bewildering. The fact is that the common reader is still out there. And they can be found in increasingly unlikely places. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Patrick Collison said at the end of 2024 that he had read ten classic novels: Bronte, Dickens, Mann, Flaubert, Melville, Eliot, James, Conrad, Woolf, Grossman. Inspired by this, Matthew Yglesias started reading classic fiction too, finishing all of George Eliot's novels in the first three months of 2025. Kyla Scanlon recently used The Screwtape Letters to analyse the economy. This energy for literature is spreading. Many of my most enthusiastic readers are from Silicon Valley or other non-literary areas. They are reading Tolstoy and Shakespeare. If I want to talk about Iris Murdoch, I am usually better off at a party of STEM and policy nerds than a literature gathering. Indeed, it is only when I meet literary people that the mood starts sinking. One English literature lecturer, who I encountered at a party recently, has only read 12 of Shakespeare's plays (one third of the total works). Another professor has seriously argued that Taylor Swift is the literary equivalent of Mary Shelley. The editor of the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't plan to. An academic at St Andrews published a piece saying that she thought it was better for students to read fewer books. 'Reading one novel in three weeks, but reading it well,' she said, 'is a perfectly good target.' Likewise, too many of the literary pessimists I spoke to about this piece haven't read many of the modern novels they assume aren't very good. If we want the rest of the world to take literature seriously, the literati needs to set a good example. The most striking recent instance of this happened on X. When the 4Chan list of the best books they had read in the last decade was published, Zena Hitz shared it, saying: 'Don't know how to break this to you but the 4channers are running circles around the pros, academics and critics.' Her replies were plagued with literary people complaining that the 4Chan readers hadn't read enough women. The very people who believe that not enough young men are reading literature (and that this is connected to the phenomena of their voting for Donald Trump) had little more than complaints and nit-picking to offer when faced with a new constituency of readers. Whenever I talk to someone who thinks we are living in a desperately bad literary time, they usually do have a favourite living novelist, someone like Tessa Hadley or Ali Smith or Rachel Cusk. These are not writers I care for, but take note that the doomers are simultaneously admirers. English literature is in good enough shape to inspire disagreements about who the good writers really are. Pessimism about literature is probably more about the question of whether we ought to care about novels anymore. Some 20 years ago, VS Naipaul declared the novel dead. Who can doubt his reasons: 'We've changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.' Terrorism, the fertility crisis, climate change, housing shortage, the fact that we cannot build basic infrastructure without years of bureaucratic delay, the financial crash of 2008, the pandemic, the rising feeling of an inevitable war we're inadequately prepared for – what has fiction had to say about the cycles of disruption in this century? Perhaps a lot of the low-beat mood among literary people is not actually about the quality of modern books, but simply about the fact that literature simply isn't as significant or important as it used to be. One reason why literary people may feel that we are not living in a great period of writing is that the writing that is truly excellent is not the sort of writing they produce. This sounds harsh, but I include myself in this assessment. So, I think the overall situation is something like this: there is still plenty of good writing, plenty of literary energy, but it is not always in the same places it used to be, and the literary establishment isn't always well aligned to its audience. We are living through a significant disruption. Instead of responding with despair, we need to adapt. This is fully achievable. As the world continues to evolve in the direction of uncertainty – caused primarily by AI and geopolitics – literature will only become more significant. It is no coincidence that people are turning back to literature now. The spread of AI will make the most 'human' activities more valuable. The returns to taste will rise. That is what literature excels at. The best work stands out all the more starkly in a world of abundant slop. We have seen this before. People decide to watch less television, scroll less social media, and read classic literature and they are amazed at the benefits. Someone somewhere is always discovering that Tolstoy is gold compared to the tinfoil of Netflix. The literati are poised on the edge of a huge social change: there is no point in asking ChatGPT to read Frederick Douglass on your behalf. Discussing those works with ChatGPT, though, is very valuable. Reading literature will also be a means of connecting with other people. We have to choose what side of this transition we are on. Do we want young people to read the Bible and Homer or do we want to complain about their choices on Twitter? Middlemarch just went viral on Substack. I see people there reading everything from the Mahabharata to JM Coetzee to Catherine Lacey. Elizabeth von Arnim was recently popular on TikTok. Can we be optimistic about that? If not, we may find ourselves left behind while literature carries on in its new forms of success. The task for those of us who care deeply about literature is to make it relevant in this new world. Even now, people are trying to find their way to books that will matter to them. Readers from unexpected places are searching for the best. If they find us too often complaining about the state of things, they will turn elsewhere. It is easy for us to see the dross that fills the shelves. But we ought to be searching as hard as we can for the best work, wherever it can be found. It is easy to regret the loss of the literary culture we all grew up with. But we are faced with the challenge of making something new. It is all too easy to see what we will lose with AI. But as Hollis Robbins told me, 'You can't be pessimistic if you fully grasp the creativity of the human mind. So much sublime work has been lost; some of it will be found. How can anyone be pessimistic when there is so much rediscovery work that AI is helping us do?' The world is full of aspiring writers. We need to raise their ambition, push them to be greater, showcase their work, be honest about their failures. Someone is always discovering Tolstoy for the first time. We ought to care a lot more about that. Patrick Collison and Matthew Yglesias and thousands of others whose names we don't know are coming to us. We need to welcome them. We need to show them what we have to offer. We need to choose between literature and politics. What the pessimists and I agree on is that this is a turning point. Where we differ is that I think we need to evangelize for the future, not decry the present. We need to read and enthuse. We need to innovate. We need to be the light that draws others in. It is time for us to shine out like a candle, to be a good deed in a naughty world. [See also: English literature's last stand] Related
The Print
30-06-2025
- Politics
- The Print
Indian Armed Forces' PR mechanism is sluggish. Information is warfare now
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Armed Forces' 'wheels within wheels' PR machinery has consistently fallen short during crises, even when we held the initiative. From LoC to the LAC, Balakot to the Brahmos missile incident and Pulwama to Pahalgam, perceptions have often been shaped by adversaries exploiting an information vacuum—created more often than not, by our inability or unwillingness to dominate information space. This highlights that warfare by information should not be seen just as a subcomponent of warfare but as warfare itself. Despite the global recognition of information warfare's criticality, the Indian Armed Forces seem to be struggling to even reach a reasonable level of information sharing, often confusing it with mere advertisement. In an increasingly digital world, where conflicts are waged not just on battlefields but in the information space, the Indian Armed Forces face an urgent imperative to redefine their communication strategies. Historical examples like Mahabharata's ' Ashwathama hato hata …..' and recent global conflicts such as Russia- Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, clearly reflect what was famously written by Marshall McLuhan in Culture Is Our Business : 'While World War I & WW II were waged using armies and mobilized economies, WW III will be a guerrilla info war with no division between military & civilian participation.' This allows the injection of disinformation and turns narratives against our great nation. Existing PR mechanism is sluggish and less effective due to the cumbersome 'elephantine' clearance process, low tolerance to mistakes, often sharing too little, too late and generally 'happy' chasing a narrative which is already in public domain. In stark contrast, adversaries operate with greater aggression, efficiency and agility. Also read: Army warns veterans against posting 'false narratives' on social media, says pensions could be withheld Dominating the narrative The core principle in this battle of narratives is that the digital world rewards virality and has very little or no time for morality or veracity. The fight invariably is on whose story wins; therefore, OUR STORY MUST WIN, it's non-negotiable. This requires a deep understanding of narrative, space, information, and domination. A narrative is defined as a coherent story influencing perceptions and shaping behaviour to achieve psychological dominance. It's the 'art of storytelling,' demanding a clear target audience and compelling content, even amid the challenges of information overload and disinformation. Drawing from Sun Tzu's Art of War principle of subduing the enemy without fighting, influence operations must focus on dominating the cognitive space. A Whole of Nation (DIME) approach—integrating diplomatic, information, military, economic, social and diaspora elements—is vital for strategic communication, both domestically and internationally. Information itself has become a weapon of mass disruption, distraction and deflection, serving as a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation. Unknown, anonymous, well-informed keyboard warriors on both sides bombard the audience with competing messages and information, which is neither true nor factual. Domination of information space is even more relevant in today's fast-moving battle of narratives. Social media, a weapon in plain sight, has exponentially amplified the reach of information, breaking down hierarchies and merging local, national, and international boundaries. It allows alternate facts (fake news), rumours, photoshopped pictures and canards to go viral rapidly, capable of portraying victory as defeat and vice versa, rendering traditional notions of victory obsolete. Hence, this vital virtual ground cannot be ceded to the adversary at any cost. Also read: There's an all-new N-word now. And India's soft power has become its hard liability Strategies for countering disinformation Effective perception management hinges on a clearly identified target audience and end state. Our intent has to be very clear because intent decides the content, content projects our intent and collectively they facilitate the desired connect with the target audience. This necessitates a sharp focus on the message, messenger and target audience. Recognising that advanced media or skillfully packaged information alone are insufficient without addressing the specific audience and information gaps. The Armed Forces, while proficient in combat, must equally prioritise winning the perception war to prevent adversarial narratives from undermining public psyche and credibility. Therefore, narrative 'management' should be more crucial than the actual act. Also read: Rafale's Sindoor strike thrilled TV war rooms—'Painted Pakistan red', 'Dharam bata diya' Integrated and proactive communication A critical need is to integrate all mediums—print, electronic and cyber —under a unified platform to align political-military aims with credible messaging. This calls for a common Tri-Services Information Warfare (IW)/PR organisation under the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), replacing the current fragmented structure of multiple information-sharing agencies. The proposed organisation would feature tri-services verticals of IW, Cyber & Electronic Warfare and Strategic Communication, with dedicated officers overseeing various aspects. The three services PROs must be completely delinked from the Directorate of Public Relations (DPR). With a very vibrant IW Branch at the formation level, the current system of 25 Regional PROs needs to be revisited, preferably done away with. In any case, PROs cannot even share basic information with the Press without clearance from Service HQs. Designated spokespersons (Brigadier/Colonel) at Formation Headquarters to swiftly disseminate initial '5 Ws & 1 H' (Who, What, When, Where, Why & How) on social media, followed by detailed press releases, is strongly recommended. The guiding principles for media engagement should be ABC: Answer, Convey, Bridge and CCD: Confident, Credible, Direct. Furthermore, the strategy emphasises generating high-quality, transparent and concise communication with strong visual content for emotional engagement. Continuous monitoring of social media for fact-checking and filling information vacuum with speed, credibility, and accuracy is crucial. The present approach toward information sharing is often ad hoc with no clear end state in mind, driven in isolation by individual media management initiatives and jumping from crisis to crisis. Employment of specialists and academic researchers as part of a military-private partnership in centres of excellence for long-term influence operations, including environment scanning and narrative development, is also recommended. Therefore, collaboration and corroboration among counter-terrorist operation stakeholders are deemed a strategic necessity. Prompt information sharing prevents impatience and frustration, while 'half-baked information' can be detrimental to national/organisational interests. Hence, proactive damage control, exposing adversaries and preemption through joint rapid response teams for fact-checking are vital to amplify positive narratives. As Yuval Harari states, 'The power of humanity lies in the capacity to tell great stories: it is the ability of humans to think imaginatively, to fictionalize, weave & tell stories effectively that makes Homo sapiens superior to other species. It is a belief in different stories of religion, history, civilization and cultural notions, laws & rights as also systems of governance that have spawned conflict. Hence, info flow shapes questions of war and peace.' In conclusion, the outdated Defence Technical Publicity Rules (DTPR) of 2004 demand a new communication strategy for the Indian Armed Forces to convey, control and ensure 'our story to win.' Overcoming the 'sound byte problem' by adopting 'Tell it all, tell it early, tell it yourself' is paramount. The era of chasing narratives is over; being proactive rather than reactive is the imperative for navigating the complexities of modern information warfare. Col Rajesh Kalia (Retd) was the media coordinator for the historic Siachen trek for civilians in 2007. He has served as the Defence Spokesperson in the North East covering MoD-related events in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur & Meghalaya. Views are personal. (Edited by Theres Sudeep)
Observer
14-05-2025
- General
- Observer
How has the Internet changed our minds?
History teaches us that the advent of the printing press sparked Europe's Enlightenment, while the Ottoman Empire hesitated to embrace it for fear of the upheaval it might bring to established patterns of knowledge and thought. That reluctance contributed to Western ascendancy, laying the groundwork for the intellectual and then industrial revolutions, and it marked the beginning of Ottoman, and by extension Islamic-civilisational stagnation. A similar inflection point occurred at the close of the twentieth century when the Internet emerged from its military and private confines into the wider human sphere. It has since effected an unprecedented shift in global consciousness, quietly penetrating our minds before its influence became undeniable in every aspect of our cognition, memory, reading habits and sense of time. In the 1960s, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan presciently declared that 'the medium is the message,' suggesting that each new technology not only reflects civilisational progress, but also actively reshapes our perception of the world. At the time, few imagined that the Internet, perhaps the most pervasive medium in history, would impose upon us a new, rapid, yet often superficial mode of knowing, dominated by images and deprived of complex meaning and sustained engagement. It has converted our brains into biological systems that forsake many traditional mental skills, such as deep memorisation, logical reasoning and analytical thought, in favour of instantaneous gratification. Neuroscience reveals that our brains possess 'neuroplasticity', the capacity to reconfigure neural networks in response to experience. Constant interaction with the Internet - its speed, interactivity and continual stimulus - becomes a repeated neural experience that slowly but inexorably reprogrammes our minds. Over time, we find ourselves unable to tolerate complexity or lengthy texts, craving fragmentation, summaries and immediate satisfaction. This marks a perilous transformation: we lose the depth of understanding, reflection, emotional engagement and intellectual stamina that once sustained us. Reading, no longer a profound cognitive practice, has become a shallow browsing, our eyes flitting from headline to hyperlink without lingering over meaning. We develop what might be called a 'screen mind", incapable of the abstraction and slow accumulation of knowledge afforded by the printed page. Online reading resembles fast food: momentarily filling but offering no real nourishment. Our memory suffers as well. As the American thinker Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, we have replaced internal recall with external retrieval. Search engines such as Google serve as extensions of our memory: we no longer retain information, only its location. This fundamental shift, from an inwardly housed knowledge to one reliant on external mediators, erodes deep memory and reduces intelligence to a precarious immediacy based on access rather than understanding. The Internet's acceleration of temporal experience is equally profound. Where once we measured time by its unfolding, the gradual sediment of lived experience, we now quantify it in notifications, updates and fleeting interactions. Emotions - joy, sorrow - have become transient states, compressed into emoticons and quickly superseded by the next digital wave. This relentless pace weakens our experiential memory, leaving us momentary beings adrift from authentic existential belonging, with neither a genuine past nor a reflective horizon of the future. Thirty years after the Internet's dawn, as we enter an even more expansive digital era shaped by artificial intelligence, we must ask: is this 'liberation from time' or a detachment from meaning? Does the proliferation of knowledge sources truly make us wiser, or have we lost the equilibrium between intellectual accumulation and digital dispersion? The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han speaks of 'digital burnout', whereby information overload and the absence of patience yield a fragmented self in perpetual pursuit of gratification rather than comprehension. Yet we cannot deny the Internet's immense promise: access to digital libraries, online courses and global lectures have forged new pathways of knowledge. The challenge does not lie in the tool itself but in our undisciplined digital habits and our inclination towards the easiest, quickest stimuli. What we need is a reclamation of cognitive sovereignty: training ourselves in intellectual patience, slow contemplation, extended reading and rigorous analysis instead of perfunctory scrolling. Our brains, built as they are from neurons, are equally shaped by habits of mind. If algorithms have transformed our thinking, we possess the will, awareness and deliberate choice to remould those algorithms ourselves. The true battle of our age is not against the Internet, but against the mental distortions born of its hasty use. The Internet remains one of humanity's most powerful technical achievements, capable of reshaping human consciousness for the better, so long as we remain vigilant against the lure of speed and superficiality. Dr Muamar bin Ali Al Tobi The writer is an academic and researcher
CBC
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Joel Plaskett offers us 'a foggy window' into his mind
Character Witness isn't a music documentary so much as a companion piece to my record, One Real Reveal and the accompanying tour where I shared memories, images and songs while seated in a red swivel chair. Working on the video edit with Mike Hall felt a bit like using two mirrors to see the back of my head. Eventually I ended up seeing versions of myself into infinity while wondering, "Do I really look like that from behind?" While I'm happy to put the producer's feather in my hat, there was no director on this. I like to think that everyone involved helped direct it subconsciously — like hands on a Ouija board. I've been thinking a lot this past while on the writing of Marshall McLuhan, in part thanks to a reading course I've been taking from his grandson, Andrew. The overheated lighting in the interview with me is a not-so-subtle nod to the documentary, "This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage" from 1967. Riffing on the effects and limitations of different technologies — from language to analog tape to projected images — it felt fitting to push the lighting, the faders and the stories into the red. Poetic license for harmonic distortion? I'll admit to always feeling a little nervous about how much I want to share outside of the songs I write. I think out loud and I have to circle a point for a while before making it. While I'm less interested in stating things explicitly these days, my hope is Character Witness offers a foggy window into how my mind meanders, my music and methods and the places and people I care about. I sure love hearing Bill Stevenson's keyboard playing, seeing Rebecca Kraatz's beautiful artwork and I'm pleased Jim Carrey could unwittingly make a cameo.
