The Meme Industrial Complex

The medium is often the message

The famous Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. This oft-repeated line summarises McLuhan’s view that how a message is conveyed dramatically affects how it reaches and resonates with an audience and what the substance of the message itself ultimately is.

As I wrote in my previous post, GE ’24 is taking place under the conditions of a digital media environment, unlike even those in the recent past. The use and abuse of social media for political communications by those both inside and outside the formal institutions of power has changed significantly, not least because of the pandemic.

Thus, while everything in Irish politics can ultimately be traced back to the ground zero of retail politics at the constituency level, the “air war” of establishing a macro strategic logic for the campaign is playing out on social media. The party HQs and digital teams are hard at work, pumping out a veritable fire hose of unadulterated content in the hopes of locking…