Billy Cox: Senator Reid (et cetera)

 https://lifeinjonestown.substack.com/p/on-filling-the-vacuum

The “medium” IS the message

Copyright 2022, InterAmerica, Inc.

 

I’ve always been a fanboy of the almost forgotten Marshall McLuhan, the brilliant delineator of media processing, from the socio-psychological standpoint:
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
 
While McLuhan offered insights to media – print press, books, television, radio, et cetera – I’ve expanded my take on his observations to include, as he, himself, did on occasion, how a presenter of media, the person, affects the message being presented.
 
For example, it’s clear, to me, that how a person looks goes a long way to establishing, in the public’s eye, how what they’re relating – whether a monologue, news report, song, (anything transmissible) – is accepted by those receiving the message.
 
Attractive persons, or persons presenting attractive material (the message), whether it’s a song – in opera, an aria – or bad news even, will find a receptive audience.
 
Unattractive people, offering a message, will often (generally) find their message slipping by the recipient or hearer, the audience.
 
In Ufology – or the world of UFOs – it seems, on the surface – that how one looks matters not to those who are enthusiasts of the phenomenon.
 
Recently, I got a missive about John Greenewald Jr. [Black Vault] whose recent YouTube talk was dismissed because John is, the writer told me,“fat” – chubby in the extreme.
 
A shallow observation? Not according to McLuhan and others who study the transmission of information.
 
(Not long ago, I posted a photo of me someone took as I was getting out of a car. It wasn’t, I thought, a bad picture. But a long-time follower of my blogs commented, “I always wondered what he (me) looked like”. And I never heard from him, again. That same photo was on Facebook for my MediaWatch readers and one guy loved it!
 
I use an old photo online, a picture used by a UFO writer in an article because to update that photo would betray how old I am and cost me a number of shallow, like me, readers.)
 
Diana Pasulka – American Cosmic author and current UFO inserter – used a younger photo of herself on her book as she is now older and a bit more matronly, not as attractive perhaps. (She or her publisher knows the value of personal aesthetics.)
 
The general crop of UFO writers, bloggers, TV personalities, et al. are slovenly. They are fat, usually, unkempt, bearded, and without class or apparent sophistication.

This is why persons like Philip Mantle despise Nick Pope. Nick has TV cachet. His English (British) voice and demeanor are attractive to viewers and listeners, whereas Mantle is chubby-faced and childish, but not in a good way.
 
Many people I like, in the UFO community, are old (geezers) or sloppy-looking, even homely, some almost ugly. And their mes- sages are affected by their appearance.
 
Are the messages totally eschewed? Not if the message is exciting, novel, or full of pizzazz.
 
But the messages are, in fact, affected or transmitted by the mitigating circumstances of the messengers. They just are; some getting full-scale attention because their content is important or unique. Others not so much because the medium – the presenter, the messenger -- is flawed in some way, betrayed by how they look or sound.
 
A 2016 UFO documentary I saw was filled by one-time UFO notables – Stanton Friedman, Jim Mars, Steve Bassett, and others. They did not look good. And their messages were crumpled by those looks.
 
On Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, (social media generally), the message is the medium but moreover the medium is the message and some of those providers of messages should remain in the shadows, not allowing their selfies to see the light of day or the internet).
 
UFOs would thank them. I’d thank them, and the public – itself a problematic group of homely humans – would be thankful.
 
RR