THE POLITARCHY
The media in the UK is a voracious beast, feeding in turn our own apparently insatiable appetite.
It is said that people get the government they deserve; I suggest we also get the media we want/deserve/allow.
Spoken and visual messages bombard our senses, we consume them, and like any other form of ingestion, they influence us. First, we prioritise communications over real-time and body-present relationships. These devices take us out of our bodies and into, as it were, the ether. Who has not answered the phone even while in mid- conversation with a flesh and blood person sitting with you in the same room?
Secondly, our Information Technology revolution occupies considerable parts of our day, time spent in considering information and messages and responding to them. The mere process of opening daily business post, whether by surface mail or e-mail, is a time-consuming process.
Then we have personal e-mails, texts, phone calls, Skype and cam-communications, Facebook and blogs, with no doubt more to come as technology advances. Peter Hamilton and other science fiction writers predict the web will become truly worldwide; then there will be a 'datasphere'. One thing is certain - speed, accessibility and comprehensiveness of cover is likely to increase.
Maurice Saatchi has pointed out that the older generation tend to be digital immigrants: youngsters are digital natives. And these natives are growing up into a culture where continuous partial attention (CPA) appears to be the norm, and in a post-literary age where many consume imagery more than written words. Soundbites are short, and it is difficult to obtain people's sustained attention. The Western world is increasingly mobile, and so is people's ability to concentrate.
"You are what you eat" is true of our media. We have consumed its product from the effluvia of pornography to the miasma of product placement, and are in danger of becoming intellectual vagrants and spiritual paupers.
Nor is this all. This very media operates in part, hand in glove, in a love and hate relationship with big business, government, and pressure groups. Many of its tentacles are owned by mega-corporations, who control both the news agenda and its output.
The media must produce, so it sprays out its product, seeking to encourage appetite so it can continue to grow - from glossy magazines to newsprint to chat rooms. It is a surprisingly small number of people, yet their voices are disproportionately loud - for example, minor celebrity status guarantees a hearing without any quality control.
Here is a media mantra, often repeated to me by a journalist friend and former newspaper editor, "Never mind the truth, tell the story." We have connived with this, sometimes even approved it, and we now have a bloated monster beyond our control and yet with enormous influence over our lives, our data flows, our opinions.
Yet this is not all. Locked in an incestuous relationship with all branches of government (including the legislature, executive and judiciary), our media, correctly termed the Fourth Estate in America, has become a major controller of our information flows, and therefore our dialogues and debates. It sets our agenda. It dictates our thought. And in so doing it has created a Politarchy, a term I have devised, derived from "polis"1 meaning city and "archo"2 meaning rule.
Our new leaders are politarchs, whose voices are heard via print or sound or moving image, and whether politician or journalist, they are locked in an unwholesome embrace, usually in and around the "Village of Westminster" 3, answerable to a strange set of arcane rules and regulations, and commercial 4 and political considerations to which the rest of us are not privy. They pay lip service to being accountable to the people, but instead march to the rhythms of a different drum. Their paradox is that on the one hand they appear to be a law unto themselves, while on the other hand they act as if bound and driven by an invisible and thus inscrutable set of rules of power and lures of might.
The media is a beast; it is a messenger, a Mercury to the Mammon of business and commercialism. It is a Voice of a surprisingly small number of people, for their voices are disproportionately loud.
And the questions I want to ask are these: Do we pay unquestioning attention to this voice and uncritically absorb its opinions? Is our personal, corporate and group agenda driven by its concerns, or God's? Do we engage with it and feed it, fight it, even fight within it, or do we ignore it? Are we obsessed with our appearance, our weight, the product and service brands we buy?
If so, we are in the belly of the beast, our personal and corporate calling subsumed to its directive.
Can we hand-rear (feed) a wolf and keep our fingers?
I suggest some of us may need to fast from the media and the politarchy for a time, and focus on scripture and fellowship and acts of service, in order to get free.
Let us hear the Voice of the Living Word, in priority to the seductive voice of Mercury.
Let them be divided, so they cannot rule.
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1 Latin Politicus Greek Politikos, from Polis, a city
2 Greek archo to be first, to command, to rule; also, chief, principal
3 which strangely tends to ignore the Power of Brussels
4 The Media's lifeblood is advertising revenue: a separate but linked industry devoted to robbing people of their self-esteem then 'selling' it back to them at the price of their product. This is a subtle but endless onslaught on the image of God in mankind.
Edited by Carol Baker