There Is No The Media
I have sayings I’ve developed together with others in an effort to see and remember what’s in front of and around and within me while also occasionally looking at a screen. These sayings arise and get hashed out among students (or people who could be mistaken for my students) so often that I sometimes forget, upon saying them, that the sayings might merit more explanation.
There is no the media.
Let me explain.
I’m involved in a lonely war against the deployment of particular abstractions. I call it RPM theory. I believe “Religion,” “Politics,” and “the Media” are perhaps the three most catastrophically unexamined abstractions in the English language.
There is no there there.
There’s people. But there is no the religion or the politics or the media. Just people making decisions.
Most of these people can be addressed as people. It can take time and effort and fancy footwork. But addressing people as persons can be done.
It works. Maybe it’s the only thing that works.
*slams fist on table* There is no the media.
Thoughts?
Editor’s note: The image above is the work of Jack Kirby.
"It can take time and effort and fancy footwork."
This is the struggle I often find myself in. Because the practice of engaging in the misreadings of others one-on-one or in more direct address and trying to impart with my own misreadings is tiring. Similar themes and arguments that come up repeatedly can wear me down and then I want to paint with a broad brush. There is no "the media, religion or politics" but there is "a media" or "a religion" or "a politics". Just so with "the woke" or "the gay" or "the conservative" or "the liberal" or "the progressive" or "the catholic" or "the evangelical"
Until we see that it is people behind these icons of our culture, we have muted progress. I am a part of ‘the media’. So are the hundreds of people I work with. The only way we walk forward is by erasing that idea of ‘the media’ and seeing ourselves as people evolving daily in symbiotic areas. Further, when someone on the ‘outside’ refers to ‘the media’ to me, I am usually offered the opportunity to lend some humanity to their proffering of whatever their ‘the media’ is spewing.