There’s no better weekly guide to how Americans are generating, processing, and understanding information than the radio show / podcast, On the Media. Now, co-host Brooke Gladstone has written a short but cogent diagnosis for understanding the fractured sense of reality that pervades the U.S. after the election of Donald Trump – and, how the fragmentation of our information landscape helped his rise.
At times, the book seems to grasp at thin air – a middle ground or “consensus reality” that isn’t there anymore in America. But that feeling of grasping at a center and not finding it is the overriding theme. The “center” that isn’t holding, for Gladstone, is only sometimes a political center – more often, it’s an epistemological center.
Since we largely know what we know through the apparatus of the media, which relay information to us far beyond our own experience, the decay of public trust in media along with its decentralization, deprofessionalization – and yes, polarization – have resulted in a fragmentation of reality as it is perceived.
To offer context to this bewildering moment, in which millions of Americans have not recovered from the shock they got on election night in 2016, Gladstone collects perspectives from an assortment of sources: sci-fi master Philip K. Dick; inventor of public relations Walter Lippman; Hannah Arendt on totalitarian creep; a dash of Milton and Schopenhauer; and guests from “On the Media” with more up-to-the-minute input.
One of the most interesting insights comes by way of neuroscientist David M. Eagleton, with his notion of the umwelt vs the umgebung. “Umwelt expresses the idea that different animals living on the same patch of earth experience utterly disparate realities,” Gladstone writes to introduce these concepts, then quotes Eagleton:
“In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves” … “The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.”
What does this suggest if we accept the notion that the media are our digital antennae as a species? Gladstone seems to be saying that it will mean perceptual distortions, informational blind-spots, that can lead us to bad responses to the world because we are misperceiving the world: we think we’re getting the whole story, and we’re not. An Emory University study is described that shows people sharply perceive hypocrisy and contradiction in candidates they are opposed to, while responding with deep discomfort when they are confronted with the same in their own favored candidate.
Gladstone’s treatise manages to offer messages both liberals and conservatives won’t want to hear. She diagnoses Trump as a demagogue and a threat to the nation. But she also insists that Trump is an American creation, and the risk of blaming it all on the Russians is to delude ourselves about the integrity of American democracy and institutions.
While her recommendation sounds like common sense: “approach conspiracy theories with extreme caution,” Gladstone’s contribution here is to back it up with a reason taken from her years of analyzing media: “because we are all primed to find an explanation that preserves our web” (of assumptions, expectations, and biases).
Given Gladstone’s argument that common context is dissolving due to separate media universes, the book is a bit of a paradox in that it addresses itself, hopefully, to that very middle ground. It would be easy to argue that “The Trouble With Reality” is in reality, just a bit of liberal self-criticism coming out of the humiliation of Trump’s rise to power.
But partisan politics aren’t really the subject of this book despite its discussion of Trump, Trump’s lies, and why people believe them. Gladstone also seems to genuinely believe that at least part of the much-lamented polarization of our time is an illusion – a false division of people into separate camps.
