Monday, November 09, 2015

Social Media POTUS


"The media is the message," so saith Marshall McLuhan. And President Obama gets the message. He now has a staff of around twenty dweebs who keep his image flooding all the social media platforms in order to connect with those who rely on this new communication technology to get their news and opinion ... see: New York Times Story. These message multipliers allow the POTUS (President of the United States) to reach, through stealthy surrogates, a far larger audience for his agenda. Even though he rarely performs these postings, they are made to appear so ... and this lends a super-human panache to our president.

Is this fair? In our new gimmicky world ...  unconstrained by a sense of proportion or priorities ... of course it is fair. NFL teams now charge our government millions to pay tribute, during their half-time shows to our fallen military men and women ... see: Huffington Post Article. So, if nothing is really now what it appears to be ... and our president doesn't write the Teleprompter speeches he performs ...why shouldn't his postings on social media also be an artifice?

2 comments:

ChillFin said...

Has ANY President since Harding or maybe even Lincoln EVER completely written his own speeches?

George W. Potts said...

I think Ronald Reagan was very instrumental in crafting his speeches.