E-quality

As I listen to the current ravings of Paul Ryan, the New Gingrich, I have to wonder what planet he and his Tea Party backers inhabit. Then I ponder on the endless stream of electronic communication available on the Web. I look at Facebook and realize that Facebook to some might seem to be a real place, where everyone has a cute icon and crisp lives in uniform font.

Marshall McLuhan, Media Prophet

E-quality isn't equality. The war against poverty and ignorance hasn't been won just because everyone seems to have an iPhone. In fact, the enforced conformity of the Information Age, where there are few practical alternatives to electronic media for getting through daily urban life, creates an illusion of equality far more dangerous to those who are underprivileged.

Information is power. Lack of it is crippling in the Information Age. Those who are consigned to failure by crumbling urban school systems are made invisible. They do not grin from Facebook pages if they cannot afford a broadband connection or an expensive monthly smart-phone contract.

The new media work for those who can afford them or have the education to use them effectively. Those who cannot are silenced, cast into the darkness away from illuminated screens.

So, who are Congressman Ryan and his Tea Party friends targeting? The poorer elderly who depend on Medicare and Social Security for their survival and those in society who need so-called entitlements to get through a rough patch or to compensate for a disability. These are the people who can least effectively fight back in the new media. Who does Congressman Ryan loudly defend against any taxation? Households which make over $250,000 per year, who happen to be those who have the greatest access to and control of the new media. This group also happens to be a tiny  minority (approx. 2%) of the American population. Perhaps Ryan hopes to convince the 14% of American households who make between $100,000 and $250,000 a year that their interests are the same as those in the top 2%. Unfortunately, for Mr. Ryan, declining income trends in the U.S. middle class may make this a harder sell. Even a harder sell to the 30% of American households who make between $50,000 and $100,000.

While approximately 46% of American households make over $50,000 a year, the majority of American households live on less than $50,000 a year. The national median income is around $44,000 a year. So, why is Mr. Ryan so vigorously screaming against raising taxes on the wealthy and diminishing the quality of life for the vast majority of American households? The answer is simple: Because in the age of new media he can get away with it. He and his Tea Party people can take advantage of the new media deficits of those at the bottom of the society and use more traditional, corporate-controlled mass media to convince them to vote against their own interests. This renders the minority of politically independent, progressive people in the upper 46% of the population powerless, since they cannot access those who are not engaged in new media. And, any true progressive who has watched PBS lately can see that Ryan and his friends have succeeded to intimidate that mass media outlet as well.

Marshall McLuhan said in his 1970 book, From Cliche to Archetype, that satellite medium "ends 'Nature' and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed." Ryan and his Tea Party folks have learned to manipulate media to convince the greater majority of Americans that they have the interests of the nation at heart. This is indeed programming of the most cynical and destructive kind. Unfortunately, it threatens to become the universal politics of the future. Silvio Berlusconi has certainly mastered the technique in Italy.

E-quality could become equality in a country where broadband access is available and affordable for all citizens, an initiative supported by the Obama administration and resisted in Congress for obvious reasons. As a humanist, I try very hard to maintain an awareness that a large number of my fellow human beings are indeed left behind by innovation, not improved by it, in an uncontrolled free market economy. Taxation, controls on corporate greed and entitlements are necessary to bring those left behind into the democratic process.