v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Shut Down the Government Fountain of Misinformation

From PressThink, some necessary rethinking and strong advice to get the virus of misinformation out of the press reports:

Even this far into his term, it is still a bit of a shock to be reminded that the single most potent force for misinforming the American public is the current president of the United States. For three years this has been a massive — and unsolved — problem for the country and its political leadership.

But now it is life and death. On everything that involves the coronavirus Donald Trump’s public statements have been unreliable. And that is why today we announce that we are shifting our coverage of the President to an emergency setting.

This means we are exiting from the normal system for covering presidents— which Trump himself exited long ago by using the microphone we have handed him to spread thousands of false claims, even as he undermines trust in the presidency and the press. True: he is not obliged to answer our questions. But neither are we obligated to assist him in misinforming the American people about the spread of the virus, and what is actually being done by his government.

We take this action knowing we will be criticized for it by the President’s defenders, by some in journalism, and perhaps by some of you. And while it would be nice to have company as we change course, we anticipate that others in the news media will stick with the traditional approach to covering presidents.

This we cannot in good conscience do.

Switching to emergency mode means our coverage will look different and work in a different way, as we try to prevent the President from misinforming you through us. Here are the major changes:

* We will not cover live any speech, rally, or press conference involving the president. The risk of passing along bad information is too great. Instead, we will attend carefully to what he says. If we can independently verify any important news he announces we will bring that to you— after the verification step.

* We plan to suspend normal relations with the Trump White House. That means we won’t be attending briefings. (We can watch them on TV.) We won’t gather around him as he departs in his helicopter. We won’t join in any off-the-record “background” sessions with Administration officials. We won’t enter into agreements of any kind with the Trump team, which includes those nameless “senior advisers” who mysteriously show up in news stories.

* We have always tried to quote public officials accurately, including President Trump. In emergency mode we add a further check. In addition to, “does this fairly represent what he said?” we will ask: is what he said something we should be amplifying? If it is simply meant to demonize a group of people, rewrite a history that now embarrasses the President, or extend his hate campaign against journalists who are doing their job, we may decide not to amplify it, even though it happened. An old tenet of White House reporting states that what the president says makes news— automatically, as it were. Today we are disabling that autoplay system and replacing it with a manual one.

* In general, we will be shifting the focus of our coverage from what President Trump is saying to what his government is doing. We will be de-emphasizing the entire White House beat and adding people who can penetrate the bureaucracy from the rim, rather than the center of the distortion machine.

* Experience has taught us that there will occasionally be times when the President makes a demonstrably false claim, or floats a poisonous lie, and it is too consequential to ignore. We feel we have to tell you about it, even at the risk of amplifying his deceptions. In those special cases, we will adopt a news writing formula that has been called the “truth sandwich.” It is a more careful way of reporting newsworthy falsehoods. First you state what is true. Then you report the false statement. Then you repeat what is true. Like so:

In January and February, President Trump minimized the danger of the coronavirus. “We have it totally under control,” he said on Jan. 22. But two days ago he tried to erase that fact and escape accountability for his prior statements. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” he said. If we judge by his public statements this is an outright lie. On Feb. 27, at a White House meeting he said: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Refusing to go with live coverage. Suspending normal relations with his White House. Always asking: is this something we should amplify? A focus on what he’s doing, not on what he’s saying. The truth sandwich when we feel we have to highlight his false claims. This is what you can expect now that our coverage has been switched to an emergency setting.

One more thing. Because we don’t know that we have done this right, and because your confidence in us describes the limits of what we can achieve as journalists, we will be hiring immediately a public editor who is empowered to field complaints, decide if something went wrong, find out how it happened, and report back.

Early in President Trump’s term, Marty Baron, the editor of the Washington Post, spoke these memorable words about the President’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric: “We’re not at war, we’re at work,” said Baron. This was a smart warning not to get caught up in bringing down a president.

Today we are recognizing that our journalism must shift, not to a “war” but to an emergency footing. (Donald Trump, meanwhile, is calling himself a “wartime president.”) We feel we cannot keep telling wild and “newsy” stories about the unreliable narrator who somehow became president. Not with millions of lives at stake. We have to exit from that system to keep faith with you, and with the reason we became journalists in the first place.

Last Week's Riot

Ishmael Reed writes at CounterPunch:

In a recent Nation magazine article, I wrote that the media have a “no snitch” policy when it comes to exploring “the tangles of social pathologies,” in the white community. Whites can teach blacks a thing or two about rioting. They’d have to do some research, as I have, because white looting gets very little attention from the media. For example, contrary to the media’s usual sales pitch that a riot is racial, the typical rioter who participated in the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King was Hispanic, not black. A criminologist for the Rand corporation concluded that “it was not a black riot but a minority riot.” Yet to this day the media continues to call the Los Angeles riots a black riot.

The late mayor Tom Bradley blamed the riots in Koreatown on whites; the media, however, began a loop about black/Korean relations. During the same period, Mayor Frank Jordan, a former police commissioner urged the white Rodney King riots in San Francisco and Berkeley to be restrained like the black protesters. The role of whites in the Los Angeles, Berkeley and San Francisco Rodney King riots has been erased by the media, another example of the media’s “no snitch” policy when it comes to white anti-social activity. Whites have been involved in the recent looting and trashing of stores in Oakland, while non-violent black protesters have urged them to stop. A witness called Sophlady said:

“The people who wear the masks, break windows and spray paint building are anarchists. They show at up any noticeable protest regardless of what the protest is about. Their actions should not be blamed on African-Americans protesting the murder of Freddie Gray. Very few of them are people of color.”

Whites were also involved in rioting in Baltimore, yet CNN had a black correspondent blame the rioting on black “savages” and likened the kids to those in “Lord of the Flies,” to the delight of the Bimbo, parading as a journalist, who interviewed him. If he had called the whites who rioted “savages” the right would intimidate CNN so, he’d have to apologize.

So on a Monday night, some high school kids burned down a couple of buildings and threw rocks at the police. Now if these rioters were fighting the police who represented a government that the bimbos and himbos posing as journalists were instructed by their owners, members of the one percent, to hate, the rioters would have been praised. So the Chief Himbo, CNN’s Don Lemon, and his colleagues spent more hours condemning the burning down of a CVS, which was deplorable, than the destruction of Iraq and the theft of Mesopotamian art. Maybe because they were used to promote the war. After the State prosecutor charged the six policemen for the homicide of Freddie Gray, CNN and MSNBC ran former and present policemen, “law enforcement” analysts, to criticize her decision and defend the six cops. They were allowed to comment around the clock. It was like a convention of the policemen’s union. Why do the six policemen need defense attorneys when they have Anderson Cooper? Will the six get jobs as CNN commentators if they are acquitted? Of course, their commentator, the odious Mark O’Mara, who portrayed Trayvon Martin as a thug (a lie) said that the indictment of the police would lead to disrespect for the police. CNN’s producer, Jeff Zucker, who, when NBC’s head, was accused of providing a ”cruel” atmosphere for women (take note Melissa Harris-Perry), knows how to pick ‘em.

One of the buildings that was looted was a check cashing place. Instead of looting this kind of establishment, inner city kids can find another method of looting. They can become a member of a banking firm and run a check cashing scam themselves, a payday loan operation like those that exist in the Baltimore and other ghettos. They can loot big by charging poor people up to 600% interest! Or they can loot big by selling junk mortgages to black people like those who live in Baltimore. Reporting on a scam used by Wells Fargo to swindle Baltimore’s black homeowners, the New York Times cited the testimony of a Wells Fargo loan officer: “Ms. Jacobson said in an interview, [the bank] saw the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as ‘mud people’ and to subprime lending as ‘ghetto loans.”

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On The Wire

From LA Review of Books:

In On The Wire, film scholar Linda Williams pushes back against that conventional wisdom. The Wire’s greatness, she argues, isn’t because of its literary or classical dramatic qualities. Rather, The Wire is great because of the way it uses and expands upon the resources of serial television melodrama. As Williams says, “in seeking to articulate what is so exceptional about The Wire, I shall argue that it is first necessary to appreciate what is conventional about it: seriality, televisuality, and melodrama.”

That last one, melodrama, is perhaps the most important for Williams. Melodrama, she says, is often seen as a particularly artificial mode, complete with mustache-twirling villains, weeping heroines, and exclamation-strewn intertitles. In contrast, The Wire is seen as valuable because it is true to life and nuanced. It is not like other television, in part, because it is not artificial. It is authentic.

Williams argues that this fundamentally misunderstands melodrama — a genre that she sees as central to the democratic experience and project. Her book is not just about rethinking The Wire, but also about using The Wire to rethink melodrama, and therefore as a way to rethink, or re-understand, the democratic values to which The Wire is committed. Her reading of The Wire, therefore, starts with the insight that melodrama is not artificial, but is actually a quintessentially realist genre. As a definition she states, “melodrama always offers the contrast between how things are and how they could be, or should be.” She adds, “This is its fundamental utopianism” — but it is also its fundamental realism. Melodrama, in Dickens or Harriet Beecher Stowe, relies upon a vision of the world as it is in order to imagine, or create, a vision of the world as it ought to be.

Williams contrasts melodrama in particular to classical tragedy, where the heroes “face up to the way things are — to being the ‘playthings of the gods.’” For Williams, tragedy is iconically aristocratic and conservative; it is based on the acceptance of hierarchy and power as immutable constants. Melodrama, on the other hand, is, again, a liberal, democratic mode, in which suffering is presented as unnecessary if only the authorities, and indeed the viewers, would commit to change. Melodrama is therefore the essential genre of democratic discourse. When activists on the left point to Trayvon Martin’s death and call for changes in Stand Your Ground laws, or when activists on the right wave placards touting fetal heartbeats, both are crafting melodramas by pointing to (a version of) reality and holding out the possibility of change. “Melodrama,” Williams says, “belongs to liberalism’s promise of progress, individual self-determination, and the refusal of predetermined fate.”

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Oliver on FIFA

Not Only Interesting

 

 

From Ryan Trecartin: The Real Internet is Inside You at The White Review by Patrick Langley:

Trecartin’s work is not only interesting because it enacts a literal illustration of the electric mania of modern life: I get enough of that from sixty seconds online. Rather, I like how his artworks animate the ongoing dialogue between identity and technology. The love/hate nature of this relationship arises from the mix of liberty and alienation that it affords (our world is getting faster, brighter, better; our world can feel disorientating, overloaded with information) and which, with the invention of the internet, entered an era of unparalleled anxiety and opportunity.

This tension has been with us for centuries. In the Phaedrus, Socrates reveals a deep suspicion of the written word that prefigures ongoing concerns about the dubious allure of technology. People who credulously embrace the written word will, he says, ‘appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality’. He claims the written word is ‘no more than an image’: a false facsimile of truth. When we outsource self-expression to the written word we are estranged from ourselves and the world: we dip our heads in Lethe, forget our voice.

 

It’s astonishing how much of a fuss Socrates kicks up about writing, which most of us stopped thinking of as a technology a long, long time ago. If you hollow out his argument and reassign it as a broad analogy, it helps contextualise what can seem like an exclusively contemporary concern: the lag between the onset of technological change and our ability to absorb it. In an interview with curator Jennifer Lange, Trecartin put it like this: ‘I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people. It’s like the jumper being jumped before the onset of “jump”.’ (By ‘jump,’ I can only assume he is referring to the teleportation film Jumper, mauled by critics back in 2008.)

 

Socrates’ graphophobia seems petty when set against the insidious imperialism of screen-based life: tablet computers of ever-increasing power and ever-decreasing size, a sense of global contraction, the rise of social networking as a new manifestation of advertising. Like writing, these forms of technological self-extension diminish our agency by challenging our conception of ourselves as consistent, centralised selves. We think of gadgets as our slaves, but the minute they acquire a will or agency of their own they threaten to overpower their users. From Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov, speculative fiction is littered with technological experiments gone wrong.

 

Trecartin’s films, by contrast, invert this technological anxiety. In fact, for all they might unsettle us, they present the process as thrilling, impulsive, and fun. Many of his characters read like avatars from Second Life, and the manipulation of the film is so relentless that this fusion of physical digital selves is realised within the plane of the image. This might sound slightly sci-fi, but it’s commonplace today in practices like photographic re-touching and auto-tuning. For all that they need and love their smartphones and digital cameras, Trecartin’s characters hurl them across the room in fits of pique, take hammers to flatbed scanners. The union of self and technology is attended with frustrations; crucially, however, it is not burdened by worry, loss or fear.In Ryan’s Web 1.0 , a series of photo-collages, Trecartin recasts his collaborators/friends Lizzie Fitch, Veronica Gelbaum, Telfar Clemens and Ashland Mines as avatars of future fashion. These thumbnail visions of Trecartin’s world present the self as open network, pervaded by culture. Logos inscribe themselves on flesh, brands become bodies, and personality is realised in an act of synaesthetic over-identification with consumerist ephemera.

 

Fiction within Fiction Orientalist Nonsense

China Fiction in House of Cards at China File:

Corruption—House of Cards fictional Chinese Billionaire Xander Feng, though twice tried for corruption at home, says he can sway the senior leadership of the Communist Party. Question: Possible?

Steven Jiang: Not really. It’s like saying Bo Xilai came out of prison but was tried for corruption again—and he got released again and became best pals with Xi Jinping.

Kaiser Kuo: If he’s supposed to be a princeling whose grandfather fought alongside Mao and was one of the Eight Immortals, then it’s plausible that he would have access and even influence within the very senior echelons of the Party leadership. The impossible part of course is the notion that he’d been brought up twice on corruption charges and acquitted. This to me was the most egregious bit in Feng’s backstory, and one that was wholly unnecessary to establish that he was walking a fine line.Evan Osnos: Since a trial would indicate that Feng had already failed to manage his relationship with his peers, the answer is no. This is merging two interesting but separate themes from Chinese history: In the past, you could be purged twice or three times as Deng Xiaoping was, and still recover your status. But in this day, when corruption trials are deployed only as a final verdict on your political viability, there are no second chances. You need to go as long as you can before getting tried.

* * *

Rare Earth Mining—Feng is in a joint venture rare earths mining operation with U.S. power plant billionaire Raymond Tusk. Question: Plausible?

Jiang: Not really. Beijing has linked its rare earth deposits to national interest and would never approve such a joint venture. And why would there be rare earth mining in Fujian as described in the show? Most deposits are in Inner Mongolia!

Donald Clarke: No. According to the most recent version of the Guidance Catalog for Foreign Investment in Industrial Sectors, any foreign investment in rare earths mining, even via a joint venture, is prohibited (see Prohibited Industries, Sec. II.2). This is not to say that Tusk couldn’t be involved in some arrangement with Feng that is similar in substance to a joint venture—after all, foreign investors have been able to use the variable-interest entity structure to navigate around restrictions and prohibitions on foreign investment in telecommunications—but it certainly couldn’t be called a joint venture.

Osnos: My fellow commentators have dismantled this one, but I've always been impressed with how the Tusk character has mastered the very authentic habit of constantly invoking his “35 years of dealing with the Chinese” as his trump card in conversations. Any China hand has used a version of this line before, in an attempt to squelch some bad idea or another, and we should be reminded of how it sounds.

* * *

Junkets: In the show, the sociopathic U.S. Vice President Francis Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, unearths Federal Aviation Administration records showing that Feng’s private jet has flown from Beijing to Missouri dozens of times in a few years. Question: So what?

Osnos: If this was reality, Feng is more likely to have gone to New Haven (to visit a child in prep school), then Napa (to check on his vineyards), and then Vegas. For the Chinese oligarchs, the days of dutiful work-only trips to the U.S. are over, if ever they existed.

* * *

Campaign Finance: The show’s writers would have viewers believe that Chinese gambling losses at a Missouri casino are funneled into U.S. politics by the Native American casino owner as Political Action Committee contributions, first to the Democrats, then to the Republicans. Question: Really?

Jiang: The image of Al Gore “hanging out” with Asian monks popped up in my mind—as far as I remember, that was the last time alleged illegal campaign donation involving the Chinese made news. This hasn’t been a major issue recently and I somehow doubt the Chinese would be this sophisticated in channeling money to U.S. politicians.

Kuo: Hey, after Citizens United, who knows? Even with scrutiny, the rules governing Super PAC contributions and the extent to which Super PAC contributors can involve themselves with candidates isn’t neatly laid out and easy to fudge. It’s plausible to me that earnings from Chinese gamblers—given the pervasiveness of the stereotype of Chinese fondness for gambling—could easily have gone from an Indian casino to a PAC without close scrutiny.

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Russell Brand Fun

Best Music of the Year 2012- John Talabot

 

Fin, Talabot's classic house and modern music mix has both an urban and knowing sensibility that produces dance all over my body. Nevertheless, a subtle play on what is fast becoming the most creative space for the future.

 

From RA:

Never tell John Talabot his music's cozy. In a recent interview with Juno Plus, the Barcelona-based producer expressed confusion over many of the labels applied to the music that has made him such a presence in electronic music over the last few years—"tropical" being the most obvious. He insists that he always thought of his productions as kind of shadowy. It's an interesting objection because you can hear what he's saying: There's always been a sly melancholy, a kind of sonic withdrawal and itchy discomfort, to Talabot's material that belies the shimmer at the surface.

Regardless of how you view these timbres though—and, clearly, one man's beachbum anthem is another's depressive tearbait—Talabot's been omnipresent in sets, mixes and compilations for about three years now. Across well-caned favorites like "Sunshine," "Matilda's Dream" and "Families" on labels like Permanent Vacation, Young Turks and Spain's Hivern Discs, Talabot's established his own brand of sandy haired electronica that owes as much to the jumpy Balearic strains of fellow Spaniards like Delorean and Hamburg microscopic deep house as they do to the melodic swellings of early to mid-00 heavies like Kompakt and Get Physical.

Marked by his keen sense of songcraft, Talabot's tunes are just as good (if not better) for country day strolls or evening reading than peak night hedonism. And with his debut album, fIN, finally arriving on Permanent Vacation, it's obvious from the outset that he's constructed a fifty-odd minute piece of music as cohesive and narrative-oriented as some of the best electronic full-lengths of the last few years. There are stepbacks and detours—the ambient whirl of "H.O.R.S.E." and the garbled dystopic blur of "Last Land"—that lend moments of sonic reprieve against the album's heartiest tracks. Fellow Spaniard and recent Permanent Vacation standout Pional turns up on the sultry vocal-bent house of "Destiny," with its brief lapses into bell-laced ambience that almost resemble Pantha du Prince, while "Depak Ine" opens with brief night calls—birds, frogs, all manner of cries unseen—before slipping into an eclipse of pitch-shifted vocal blurs and fuzzy synth blurts (surely one of the songs Talabot had in mind when referring to the album's blacker hues).

From The Guardian:

Barcelona house producer John Talabot has a knack for capturing the very specific kind of bliss associated with dancing on Mediterranean beaches at the height of summer. A penchant for rising chords means that all his melodies make you feel like raising your arms and face to the sun. Talabot also has arguably the greatest sense of build-and-release in dance music since prime Booka Shade: ƒin is full of incredible tension-releasing moments, from the extended break in Destiny to the entrance of Missing You's bouncing bass. The generosity of Talabot's sound can also be ascribed to the amount of disparate ingredients he puts to use in service of his aesthetic – particularly the variety of human voices on display. There are wordless chants and bright, optimistic pop hooks; an echoing scream is plucked from a horror film and deposited in the middle of a carnival on Oro y Sangre, while on So Will Be Now, cut-up vocals coalesce gradually and gorgeously into recognisable language. All of humanity seems to be here – and it's busy celebrating being alive.

From Pretty Much Amazing:

The Catalan producer hails from a sound stable saddled with the early moniker ‘Balearic’, named for the collaborations conjured up between he and his Basque country brethren – check out his shimmering remix of Delorean’s “Sunshine,” and his mate from Madrid, Pional’s many vocals on Fin. His oozy, woozy take on ambient house evokes the sun sinking below Barcelona’s rooftops, so effortlessly captured in his EP Families - yet save for the song titles, somewhat surprisingly there’s no Spanish on the album.

But for all the deliciousness and delicacy, the record is interlaced with moments of darkness – something Talabot is determined to cling to. ‘Why am I always tagged as house, or tropical or happy music when I’m making dark tracks? ’, he said in this interview. ‘I don’t understand’.

Perhaps that’s why opening track “Depak Ine” begins in the way that it does, with a haunting jungle-like atmosphere where the skittering hoots and hollers of unseen wild beasts are offset by a pounding rhythmic drumbeat. This seven minute extravaganza fully immerses the listener into the record as layer upon layer is gently spliced together, until all the slivers make up a complex, melodic slice of sound. It’s an method that’s equally well wielded on album closer “So Will Be Now,” that cuts samples of Pional’s vocal with a groovy, bouncy bass and tight finger-clicks.

Better at layering than any fashion editor, is Talabot. In the same Red Bull interview, Talabot admits he likes to sample – ‘it’s something more creative’, and this is exemplified on ”Last Land.” There are sounds you recognize and yet can’t place – it’ll make you gurn in that desperation to identify it – rounded off by a sequence that recalls Arabian Nights, all twinkly bells and twisted synths.

Media Warp

After watching the same clip last night of Richard Engel spewing innaties on the tube that Stephen Walt references in this short piece:

I hardly ever watch network news, but I happened to stumble across this appalling report on NBC's "Rock Center" last night. In this clip, reporter Richard Engel blames this week's anti-American violence on "conspiracy theories" that Arab populations have been fed over the years by their rulers, including the idea that the United States and Israel are colluding to control the Middle East.

It's no secret there are conspiracy theories circulating in the Middle East (as there are here in the good old USA: Remember the "birthers?") I've heard them every time I've lectured in the region and done my best to debunk them. But by attributing Arab and Muslim anger solely to these ideas, Engel's report paints a picture of the United States (and by implication, Israel) as wholly blameless. In his telling, the U.S. has had nothing but good intentions for the past century, but the intended beneficiaries of our generosity don't get it solely because they've been misled by their leaders.

In short, Operation Cast Lead never happened, Lebanon wasn't invaded in 1982 or bombed relentlessly for a month in 2006, the United States has never turned a blind eye towards repeated human rights violations by every single one of its Middle Eastern allies, the occupation of Iraq in 2003 was just a little misunderstanding, and the Palestinians ought to be grateful to us for what they've been left after forty-plus years of occupation. To say this in no way absolves governments in the region for responsibility for many of their current difficulties, but Americans do themselves no favors by ignoring our own contribution to the region's ills.

In short, you want to get some idea of why most Americans have no idea why we are unpopular in the region, this example of sanitized "analysis" is illuminating, though not in the way that Engel and NBC intended.

The Narcotic Effects of Media

From David Bobbitt's  essay on teaching Mcluhan's Undesratnding Media:

The chance to snap out of our numbness, provided by processes of break boundaries or hybridization, is one of several possible antidotes to the narcotic effects of media. McLuhan wrote Understanding Media, in part, as a warning about the effects of media that we are ignoring. One of McLuhan’s antidotes is awareness; by being aware of the effects our media have on us we can be in a better position to counteract them. But that is only the first step. Awareness itself is not enough. McLuhan writes in chapter 31 on television:

It is the theme of this book that not even the most lucid understanding of the peculiar force of a medium can head off the ordinary "closure" of the senses that causes us to conform to the pattern of experience presented. . . . To resist TV, therefore one must acquire the antidote of related media like print. (329)

So one antidote to the numbing effect of a particular medium is to use another medium that has a counter-effect: “When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust” (70-71). So turn off the TV (or the computer or the cell phone) after some time and read a book or take a walk in the woods. After enough reading, have a conversation with another human being. McLuhan thus is arguing that a “cure” for the effects of a dominant medium or pattern of the time can be a countervailing force in the opposite direction of the dominating force.

Another antidote to technological narcosis is for people to assume the attitude of the artist. McLuhan writes:

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception. (18)

He further claims that the “artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs” and so “the artist is indispensible in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures, created by electric technology” (65). But by “artist” McLuhan does not mean just the person who formally engages in some artistic endeavor as a profession but the person of “integral awareness,” a point he makes clear when he says: “The artist is the man, in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness” (65). Thus, the artistic perspective serves as an antidote to media narcosis because it allows us to see the big picture and the interrelationship among things, as well as to anticipate technological changes, and their social and cultural implications, before they happen.

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