Perverse Persuasion

As English majors, we are constantly debating worth of content over form. This argument has been raging since the dawn of the of Plato’s academy. Plato had always warned people of the power of the written word. That power can be manipulated and wielded in ways to promote perverse persuasion. Where Plato began this argument, it seems McLuhan caps it off with an explanation mark. McLuhan feels that the medium itself embeds a message creating a symbiotic relationship between the two. One cannot study a single piece of content within the media without studying the whole of that media. The medium holds the power of that content hostage, for the control of the message belongs to the medium.

The more effort the medium has the less the person interacting with it has to put into it. The contrast between comics and film examines this phenomenon. Where comic purposely place a gutter between panels of images and texts a film plays out the scene in its entirety. The gutter of the comic, lends the power to the reader, as a way for them to fill in the blanks. Interpretation and inference forces the reader of the comic to become interactive with the form, as they mull over the content of the read. The power never leaves the visual representation. The film medium controls the visual, audio, and content it its presentation of information. This gives rise to the ability to control more of the information making easier to manipulate to persuade the audience. Where a simple piece of the puzzle cannot be extracted and studied the form that holds that information comes under discussion.

When that conversation gets stale people become focused upon the content. The message that is present in the content is blurred via the layers of media representation of facts. A news story has facts that are interpreted by a writer, which is then edited by an editor, which is then given visuals that portray the facts in a way to sensationalize the story. Once that is done graphic visuals are added along with sound that has the ability to take the facts and control them and make them something that they are not.

This is not a new thing; in fact it is an old thing. During the beginning of the American Revolution, the media misrepresented facts, in the retelling of the story of the “Boston Massacre.” With Revere’s engraving, of his perspective, of what happened that wintery day in Boston, helped the Sons of Liberty to elicit mass popularity for their “revolution” on British tyranny. The media has always used rhetoric as a way to twist facts and construct new meanings via the presentation of the facts.