If you’ve ever taken a communications or journalism 101 course, you’ve heard the famous adage of late Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. This adage certainly held true during this week’s social media conversation between billionaire X owner Elon Musk and U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. To put it bluntly, their conversation was drab — boring, even. And yet it was fascinating, too: the medium offered more of a message than the two men could have ever hoped to.
Neither man is particularly known for his oratory prowess, yet both are capable of wrangling enormous crowds (in this case, at least 1.2 million) to hang on to their every word. Their conversion (Musk took pains to iterate that it was not an “interview”) was also a first: a former president and incessant gascon, coming off the high of a near-assassination and entering an election campaign of unprecedented polarization, shooting the breeze with an equally polarizing famous man who’s also prone to making inflammatory statements that rival the intensity of an EV battery fire (often in the form of dank memes).
They spoke using the billionaire’s private social media platform. No mainstream or legacy media, and no television network, was involved. And it was here, within the confines of what is alternately described as Musk’s pet project or the last bastion of free speech in the West, where they had a very long (over two hours) and equally underwhelming chat — a conversation that everyone seems to be talking about. Why is that?
What McLuhan — who died in 1980, before the internet era — meant by “the medium is the message,” was that all information contains other (often revelatory) information, by virtue of its mode of delivery. In the 1950s, watching the news on the black-and-white television set in your living room was less about the news anchors’ words than it was about the fact that families now had a newspaper come to life, blasting information to the entire family.
Anchors could smile, wink and emphasize or de-emphasize words at will — a drastic change from an objective news report printed in black ink. You didn’t have to pick up a newspaper and quietly focus on the words; the words were now all-encompassing. World events and tragedies, once relegated to print and black-and-white photos on a page, became far more real. The effect on people was revolutionary. The medium was the message.
It seems that much of the leftist fourth estate and pundit class is now looking at the Musk-Trump X talk with the anxiety of a ruling nobility that doesn’t want to accept a change to the status quo. Can they see the narratives they’ve built slipping through their fingers? Are they running scared because Musk has enabled an oft-maligned politician to serve his words directly to the people, unfiltered by any media narrative? Is the far-left media afraid of losing its grip?
The headlines were predictable: Trump Repeats Same Talking Points During Musk Interview; Donald Trump’s Meandering Live Chat with Elon Musk on X Plagued with Glitches; Donald Trump and Elon Musk: A Tale of Two Struggling Social Media Entrepreneurs; The Musk-Trump X Interview: A Surprisingly Dull Meeting of Two Planet-Sized Egos; Rambling Trump, Musk Interview Marred by Tech Issues; So Donald Chatted with Elon; and Musk’s Trump Talk: After Glitchy Start, a Two-Hour Ramble. Each of the headlines screams: don’t listen!
Musk has since posted that he is happy to host Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for a similar conversation on X. We can hope, but it’s unlikely to happen. X is now advertising itself as “the world’s town square.” Perhaps it’s true. And perhaps it won’t be long before Harris and her team are left with no choice other than to engage with this modern form of mass media. I can’t prognosticate about future media like Marshall McLuhan did. But what does seem obvious is this: the conversation between Musk and Trump was precedent-setting. It was new. It was a beginning (of what, exactly, remains to be seen).
Do you remember what Musk and Trump talked about? No one could blame you for forgetting. But, damn, wasn’t it something?
National Post