Time and time again, from my critical media ecological perspective, I find that folks take for granted the fact that language is a media. And, most importantly, that language builds on itself, inclining all other media that exist today.
To explore taken for granteds like this, I combine a traditional media ecological approach (made popular by canon like McLuhan and Postman) with critical cultural insights. This brief essay on open letters is another, arguing that: language is a blueprint that mediates all of our “media”, including human beings.
I’ll explain what I mean by that by first overviewing traditional concepts of U.S. humanness, authority, and authorship. Then discussing who writes open letters and why they often do.
Through the use of letters, I might say: The U.S. is an individualistic society founded by colonizers who crafted linguistic concepts that only rich land-owning able-bodied Eurocentric cismen were “civilized,” and, thus, are “human”.
Specifically, I could document how they used rhetorics of “manifest destiny,” “savagery” and “progress” to claim that they were entitled to Indigenous lands. Then, in the following century, Enlightenment thinkers linguistically and materially extended their logics with industrialism. Industrialists introduced ideas of “rationality”, “efficiency”, and “innovation,” dehumanizing already vapid humanness.
I might also trace out how during the 1600s, their protégés continued to craft a concept of humanness around themselves, and called it “Objective”. This was the era when the first U.S. university, Harvard, was also first established. Acceptance was exclusive: able-bodied white cismen whose fathers colonized land.
I am able to investigate how these Enlightenment ghosts went on to profess eugenics, naturalizing racisms, ableisms, and cisheterosexisms into institutions. This is to say, I can hunt how their ideas of humanness haunt us to this day.
And how these cismen as media inform who writes open letters, and why they disproportionately feel inspired to share their message(s).
I say this all to remind how, we build relations through ideas, like institutions. Language enacts schemes, framing people and their ideas as either “worthy” or “unworthy” of being legitimized.
Another traditional concept within media ecology is called “breakdown as breakthrough”. The idea sketched in this phrase is that we understand something best when we see how it breaks.
For instance, Weber wrote extensively about the idolization of rationality, pushed to extremes, standardizing bureaucratic functions, and replacing emotions / the heart with logic / the mind.
In other words, humans as media have inclined a dehumanizing sense of humanness. An idea of humanness that idolized canonical logic, and, as a result, devastated our ecological symbiosis.
Their language usage, as media, became ideologies that to this day dictate who holds authority. This is why canonical thinkers are dominantly idolized, while critical cultural scholars are vilified. Our myopic concept of humanness and authority informs who writes and what inclines them. Which is not to say that those who don’t qualify don’t write. We just aren’t equitably respected.
Just as Enlightenment subjects were born into the “right” body, the majority of folks in any type of authority today embody and/or espouse colonial capitalist perspectives, logics, and practices. Transnationally and globally, this looks different, but predominantly these Western concepts are built into dominant technologies, despite the feminization of labor and civil rights movement. Keep in mind, most progress resulting from civil rights and the feminization of labor didn't occur because businessmen had changes of heart, but because neoliberal changes became profitable.
Open letters can reveal which public figures comfortably conform to deadly power relations. We must remember that biases act as features, not bugs, in technologies. Whether it is a human or object. And that most linguistic “data sets” informing human “media”, at best, predict U.S. past.
Technologies, built through language, then mediate our relationships, and therefore incline the ways that our messages are sent and received in ways that make differences. From a traditional media ecological perspective, when a technology is introduced into a society, it influences the entire society. This approach reveals that when you publish an open letter, it will be sent and received differently than if/when you read it out loud to someone in person, etc. And, taking this a step further, from my critical media ecological view, we also know that a PhD in Neuroscience will send and have their messages received differently than a PhD in Sociology.
This is not only because they were trained differently with different linguistic aims, and/or because they were certified differently with use of language, but also because profit-oriented dominant narratives (built using language) valorize the former degree as “superior” to the latter.
These biases are built into institutions as features, inoculating many of us from ever respecting knowledge that falls outside of quantified, individualistic, profit-approved logics and practices.
It is clear now that with all things the Internet has changed, many more remain the same. Most notably, the current algorithmic envirusment (environment + virus) age has made this the most connected lifetime in human history, challenging traditional authorship with platform influence.
Yet, both social media algorithms and normal journalist filtering (human editors acting as media in journalistic processes) alike continue to reinforce age-old problematic eugenic “new normal” discriminations, leading to censorship and shadow bans. Open letters in these media outlets by folks inside or outside of elite institutions most often amplify establishment powers and control.
As John Durham Peters explores in his work, we speak into the air for varying reasons. Perhaps because we desire to be seen or heard. Millennials and Gen Z folks have spent most of our lives speaking into various unkind digital voids. With new normal, yet denied, virality, this algorithmic envirusment (environment + virus) is inflaming ancestral wounds of unaccustomed resonance.
Receiving ends of erased and unexpressed rage (now being released) often claim: “connections are bad”. Yet this most connected time in humanity has revealed our expressions can heal us, regardless.
What would you say if you could say anything? Would you say it regardless of if anyone heard?