Two decades after the internet began allowing people to publish to the masses and connect with each other, second-generation pundits have settled in to a dumb “social media are awesome” dogma that now appears stagnant.
So overwhelming is this wall of hyperbole, espoused by the likes of Mashable and adhered to by thousands of junior marketing executives trying to turn their Twitter hobby in to corporate brownie points, that any attempts to move to a more refined assessment of media and technology is often relegated as Luddism. You’re either all-for or you’re old news.
Or, at least, that’s how cultural critic Paul Morley felt whilst discussing matters in a seminar panel about Marshall McLuhan at Bristol’s Watershed on Thursday.
Morley, a former NME writer and BBC Review Show contributor, is not a cynic. He said: “The (current) revolution is much more important than the punk one.” But he criticised “complacency about progress”. Discussing McLuhan’s legacy with artists and academics who are now online converts, however, he felt he was “in a room with a bunch of strangers who have suddenly branded me as Simon Cowell’s cousin”.
That was a shame. Morley, a healthy sceptic, had attempted to distill a more considered assessment of the times, as though channelling McLuhan himself, who was a careful observer of media trends and effects rather than an all-out digital champion. Here are some Morleyisms.
But, unlike McLuhan, who gained quite a cult following in the 1960s, Morley felt his views left him intellectually isolated in today’s digital crowd, acknowledging the aphorism: “If you try and complain about the times you live in, then your time is up. It may be that my time is up.”