this is not a paul

In 1929, Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte painted La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), a picture of a pipe (the smoking kind) with the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

“It’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe.’ I’d have been lying!”

The message expressed in a particular medium is not the thing it is expressing.

I write words. I see things. I tell people about those things. I feel it’s important to do and I enjoy doing it, people sometimes appreciate it. 

But these words are not those things. Mirrored repetition is impossible. There is no perfect circle.

This is important to point out.

But as Margaret Atwood says, “A word after a word after a word is power.”  

Those words, that power, are not more than that. They are not what they represent nor are they power beyond what the listener allows it to be.

Or is it more complicated?

In 1964, Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously named the first chapter of his new book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “The Medium is the Message.”

The content or character of what we see in the medium, in the media, on the wires, in ink, via artificial intelligence is what we consume and understand, yet we too often overlook the character of the medium itself. 

When presented with a salacious magazine story about a celebrity or a blockbuster movie or an online news site’s clickbait headline, or a Tweet by Elon Musk, we ingest the content voraciously, we love or hate or ignore but we look. 

We salivate and lust for it as if it were meat carried by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.

What we miss is the structural changes to our communities, to our workplaces, to our lives, to our brains, that is introduced into our world as the medium evolves. What has evolved is a transformation in our communities and in us as a result of a complicated dance of information and technology that none of us entirely comprehends any more.

The algorithms foment outrage, stoke our inclinations good and bad, rile us up to become suspicious of our next-door neighbours and enemies of people across the world who we don’t even know.

It isn’t just what we consume, it’s how we consume it, and sometimes it consumes us. 

And remember, if you aren’t paying for a product, you are the product.

-30-

Paul J. Henderson
pauljhenderson@gmail.com
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