Seventh International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Hannah Arendt argued that the evil of the Nazi regime came from a shallowness of thought, from rendering atrocities into the banal. Decades later, theorists increasingly noted that television news was simplifying media into a terrain of headlines and soundbites. The relationship between airtime and complexity of information became clearer: the less of one, the less of the other. Today, social media are entrenched in the lives of people around the world. These media offer users opportunities to engage in worldwide discourses. However, these media have also continued to exert pressure on the ability to communicate complex ideas. For instance, even the expanded size of a tweet, now 240 characters, would still only account for just the first two sentences of this abstract. This paper investigates the “shallowing” of media in the age of the Internet from a critical lens by engaging with the work of Marshall McLuhan. It then reads that shallowing through the works of theorists such as Arendt and Umberto Eco, who explored totalitarianism and fascism in the 20th century. This juxtaposition reveals that social media in the 21st century have facilitated the development of a banal media landscape which is ideally suited for the articulation and growth of fascist ideological thinking.