Silent majority

Marshall McLuhan coined the term ‘Global Village’ in the 1960s. McLuhan argued that the medium through which humanity generally communicates in each era defines its personality — and the change from oral to written to electronic media has affected human perception, understanding, feeling and values. This was his theory of Media Ecology.

Media as in ‘medium’ comes from the Latin medius or ‘middle’, and generally speaking, it is the carrier of expressions between two communicators.

It is not as if ‘media’ has precedence upon ‘content’, which is an equally valuable and independent factor in communication, and is the real bearer of perceptions, feelings and values. Yet, McLuhan’s theory takes us back to an older concept given by Aristotle — that of ‘ethos’. He says ethos is the mode of persuasion in an argument, which may depend upon practical skills and wisdom of the speaker; his virtue or goodness; and his goodwill towards the audience. In Aristotle’s theory ethos does not belong to the speaker but to the audience i.e. the listener decides if the ethos of the speaker is strong or not, again giving precedence to the medium between the two.

Aristotle’s theory may seem a little simpleton in the 21^st century. In our era, of electronic media, the speaker and the listener are far apart and the listener’s verdict upon the value of the ethos of the speaker, if any, is diluted with distance and multiplicity. In today’s media, for one speaker there may be millions of listeners, and the speaker is enclosed in a safety box wherefrom wavelengths can be given out but cannot enter back to him. This one-way communication renders the audience, the majority, that is aware of its incapacity to respond — silent.

This silence of the majority, and the majority’s acceptance of remaining the permanent, disassociate listener, create this unique ethos of our modern era. And the ethos of our time seems to be a media-dictated, one-way flux of information that is so immense, so diverse and so repetitive that however much the listener poses to be disconnected, he will inevitably accept some part of it.

This same media is, in turn, used by political forces to establish politically correct behaviour, which is grounded in every discussion as the agreed-upon established givens, upon which the debates will be built.

These facts become the norm of the thought; they become an added value that allows the thought to experiment upon its fresh combinations, to set forth new theories. Though these basic generalisations form a comfort level upon which educated debate can be generated, it also creates a mindset that is uncritical of its own framework — a kind of status quo, the breaking down of which would end the debate in nothing but contention. This is the danger that needs to be pointed out; theories that are taken as absolute facts, concepts that are taken for granted as base knowledge — on account of mere currency — have the alarming ability to become part of the medium instead of the content.

According to McLuhan, media is infused in every act and action in society, it fixes our perceptions and organises our experiences, and it ties the world together. By this he might be referring to all means of transfer of information that surround us, like sound, vision, written word and so on. Yet the electronic media, by far, overruns all other media in fixing and organising our thought and tying us together. Therefore, when a concept becomes a part of the electronic media, its permanency of recurrence and one-sided approval give it a consent that had never been taken from the people but which was only informed to them. The silent majority thus becomes a submitted pupil of the very assertive and dictating teacher — the Media — which poses to be the more-educated one teaching the less-educated ones.

The more popular definition of media though, says that free media and journalism is true representative of the masses — just like elected representative say that they are true representatives of the people who have elected them. But it is conceivable that the teacher will also teach us that s/he is the pupil’s only and foremost well-wisher. This is surely not to undermine the respect of the teacher, rather it is to warn the silent majority that education must only be a set of tools and techniques that enable us a creative experience into all sorts of concepts, giving us the courage to question everything to the core of matters. Education must be an opening of choices, not a dictation of assumed good choices.

Therefore, one should acknowledge that there is a time when everyone has to leave school, a time when we should be ready and strong enough to make our choices, and decide for ourselves. Yet the electronic media poses upon us the threat of being our teacher to our graves, and its mere omnipresence in society ensures our submission to it.

So, should the silent majority start making its own voice? Is there a way for ensuring a truly interactive, fully representative media? Can the teacher-pupil relation be changed into a conscious choice-making at every level? Can the choice be not educated to think in only specified allies but be free to choose what it really wants to choose? How does it serve free choice if the Media is to label certain schools of thoughts as bad or as the forbidden tree and some others as unquestionable and consented upon?

If we, as a people, are not just a tool in the utilitarian machinery, merely striving to make our material ends meet; if every human soul carries in its person, along with its fleshly needs, some essential hallowed and intangible needs too, then every person needs to register his/her fundamental choices of their lives in some medium or the other. And society as a whole is obligated to take this registration into account.

There is another paradox related to the silent majority, whenever a part of the silent majority endeavours to register its will in the mainstream media, it is quickly dragged into the media-class and the majority is practically rendered silent again. A broad-based and inclusive representation of the majority is probably a dream not coming true any time soon, there are surely diverse types of hurdles in the way, but ultimately, we can say that the majority is silent because it is or has been trained to be numb and dumb towards its urge to register its will.

The silent majority, for its inactive nature, may remain silent forever — as there is no freedom that one gains without fighting for it; and that whatever is for-granted is a submission.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 23^rd, 2022.

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