Forget Messiahs

Abstract

In this short essay, I talk about the political messiahs, how they are elevated to prominence via affective news, and something that I refer to as civic adulthood.

I no longer believe in messiahs.

I am not sure I ever did. There was time when I idealized political leaders. I had my own heroes. Indira Gandhi. Olof Palme. So many others. Everyone has their own.

I don’t anymore. There are people who I admire. But, everyone is a little wrong and a little right. A little bit perfect and a little bit broken. No one is capable of saving me, us, or the world. This isn’t a Marvel comics storyline. It’s life.

Perhaps this realization comes with finally becoming an adult? I swore I would never become one. I kind of always wanted to remain a kid. One of my college professors, Sandy Stone, had studied with Donna Haraway. Another hero. We asked her once what that was like. She’s like a kid, Sandy responded. What a great quality, I thought! I want to always be a kid. I later figured out that dealing with a lot of things became easier if I decided to be a so-called adult about them. I guess it’s not so easy to be a kid all of the time. Part of not being a kid means understanding you are on your own, and that no one is going to save you.

So, I try my best to be an adult. A civic adult. No one is going to save me. I have to look after myself. Living in a democracy means that I do so without hurting others. It also means that I do so while helping others. Incidentally, being human means exactly the same. The democratic condition is a human condition. It’s not about politics or governance. It is about being human. I try. And I often make mistakes.

I am not interested in electing a messiah into office. I am interested in electing a human being. One that is qualified for the job. It is a job. The campaign is the interview process. Elections are when we decide. Sorry to burst the mythic proportions, we ascribe to governance. This is what I now believe.

I don’t want to hear from messiahs. I do not want to see them online. I do not want media to give them a platform. Messiahs use media. That is how they attain messianic status. Without media, they are mere humans; often mediocre humans. With media, they present as superheroes.

For the most part, politicians are uncomfortable with the manner in which media like radio, TV, and photojournalism blur public and private boundaries. And social media amplify the overlap between public and private spheres, leaving politicians at a loss when it comes to making use of social media. I am deeply suspicious these days of anyone who is effortlessly comfortable with using social media, with blurring private and public.

Messiahs, on the other hand, appear to be quite comfortable with the overlap of public and private and adept at using social media not just as their personal PR uber agents, but also as a way to energize publics that they connect with and publics that they aggravate—that they annoy.

How does this happen, and what is it about the structure of news that further empowers them?

A few years ago, I embarked on a line of research that was designed to understand how Twitter functions as a news storytelling platform. This was around 2010. Twitter was a different medium then, and it supported mostly community-oriented conversation among friends with some snark; a peculiar blend of mass broadcast polyphonic communication that emerged out of mostly one to one, dyadic, conversations. There was a lot of speculation about how news organizations might use it. And also, about how citizens could put it to work. And then came the Arab Spring. And the indignados movement. And Occupy. And showed us the part that Twitter could play in helping tell the stories of movements that media institutions were not prepared to understand.

There was a lot of talk back then about whether social media, mainly Twitter, made the revolutions. What a useless conversation that was. Change is gradual. Revolutions are long. They have to be long, to attain meaning. And sometimes they lead away from, and not toward democracy, as we have seen. So, no, social media do not make or break revolutions. But those revolutions definitely made social media. In so doing, they reinforced this brand of news that I call affective. And this brand of news enables messiahs of all sorts, political, and non.

What is affective news? It emerged as we studied the crowdsourced, bottom up, live tweeted, curated, and swarm fact checked stream of news that took over news storytelling during the Arab Spring and many of the movements that followed it.

Affective news is a mix of live tweeted news reports, drama, fact, and opinion blended into one, to the point where discerning one from the other is not possible and doing so misses the point. It is not new, but amplified by social media.

What is affect, and why do I term this brand of news affective?

Affect is not the same as emotion. These were not emotional news reports that we were reading. Affect is the sensation you feel before you experience an emotion and before your cognitive mechanisms kick in and help you label that feeling as an emotion. When you tap your foot to a song you like. That is an affective reaction. When you hum a song.

What does affective news look like? Well, short, report-like, with some opinion and drama thrown in, in about less than 200 characters, and above all intense. Affect is not feeling. It is about the intensity with which we feel. It is the difference between me poking you, versus pushing you or shoving you to the ground. It is the difference between a caress to the cheek and a slap to the face. Same gesture—but different intensity, revealing different intention, and a different outcome.

So—how does this connect to messiahs?

Messiahs connect affectively. They present that blend of “facts,” drama, opinion, and intensity blended into one. The problem is that not only do they deliver that, but journalists pick up on it and are enamored by it, whether they agree with it or not. Or perhaps it is not journalists who are enamored by it but the attention economy that drives news. When has news not been driven by an attention economy? Bottom line, this gets reported as news.

Thus, news media reproduce affective narratives. And here is the thing. Affect, intensity, is not an event. It is a way for citizens to sense their way through a story. Things become problematic when affect, this intensity, is reported AS the event. In this manner, we observe tweets that automatically become headlines—with no fact checking, no editorial acumen exercised. We hear one liners filled with alarming intensity—but never receive more substance. We hear a lot about plans, but never more detail—these one liners are repeated over and over again as refrains, as choruses, that lull us into agreement or indignation to the point where we produce affective reactions of our own—what are some examples of these? We mute the channel. Turn the news off. Block. Take long term leaves from our social media feeds.

Affect—this form of intensity—can be very successful in sustaining feelings of community. And these feelings of community can either reflexively drive a movement forward, or they can entrap publics in a state of engaged passivity. A lot of intensity, but no movement. Imagine being caught up in an ongoing, never-ending, ever evolving loop of intensity with no way out. No form of release. This is nightmare for citizens. Yet it is the civic reality most of us around the world exist in. The civic infoscape of this reality is sustained by our media.

My recommendation for journalists? Change. Evolve. You have been resisting change ever since the advent of the internet, which you tried to mold into your paradigm. That did not work. What to do with messiahs? Refuse to elevate them to prominence. Treat them as humans. Humans with faults and with talents. Find out what they are really like behind the messianic projection. Be, in the words of James Hamilton (2016), democracy’s detectives, journalists. You are truth finders. You are not storytellers—resist the tyranny of the narrative, which forces us to come up with characters, drama, and plot twists—you are truth finders, who work with storytelling media.

Citizens, you are the storytellers. You are the sensemakers. You tell stories to make sense of things, of you who are, how you fit into this world. In an attention economy, citizens, your attention is a powerful commodity. It’s your path to agency. Choose how you focus your attention. Don’t squander your attention to clickbait headlines. Play hard to get. Don’t be a cheap date. Your attention is your power.

Technologies network us, yes. But it is our stories that connect us. Identify us. And potentially disconnect us. And journalists can use technology to give us access to information of a better quality. Equal access to that information. So that we can tell the stories that identify us. Bring us closer. And do not divide us. So we can be better civic adults. And so that we do not need messiahs.