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The Kaleidoscope Effect:
How Trump captures hearts and kidnaps minds on social media.
For those who’ve never seen one, a kaleidoscope is a toy consisting of a tube with two longitudinal mirrors inside set at right-angles. At one end of the tube is a lens to look through. At the other two clear discs containing a loose collection of translucent pieces of coloured plastic. When held up to the light the pieces roll and tumble as we rotate the tube. And while the pieces make only random arrangements the mirrors reflect them to produce a beautiful unified pattern, an ever-changing mandala of form and symmetry. This is precisely how the random, colourful fragments of speech Donald Trump employs on social media work on his audience of the credulous and adoring.
Around 2005 I noticed something new on the global political scene. Around the world politicians had noticed something useful in the 24/7 media cycle. This was that well managed press conferences kept every journalist to one question with no time for follow up.
The smarter ones soon realised that any question need only be given an answer that was grammatically and syntactically correct. It need contain no meaning at all. In fact, the more anodyne or banal the reply the better. Without follow-up the journalist was stymied. No dangerously pithy sound bite could be extracted from a meaningless but apparently sincere reply. And the journalist had completed his function by recording the pablum served up.
“Colourless
green ideas sleep furiously.”
This is because the structure of language precisely fits our
understandings, and shapes our understandings, in ways that were first
described by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s with his immortal sentence; “Colourless
green ideas sleep furiously.” While we know this to be both internally
contradictory and logically meaningless it serves all the structural
requirements of speech and language for us to supply the validation it requires
as a sentence, and therefore as a ‘valid’ piece of communication.
Thus, the ever-hungry media cycle began a downward spiral of increasingly ineffectual journalism and accountability. At the same time another force was working against journalists from the other direction. Not so long ago, journalists were primarily talking to a relatively ‘elite’ audience. When it came to politics their audience was educated to at least post-High school literacy, steeped in political syntax and philosophy to a level where they could engage in debate with understanding. This audience demanded clarity in what they were told.
But that audience has shifted. With the rise of Twitter and text-speak the common language was no longer a level of clear, accurate communication. First punctuation was jettisoned, and with it went the sentence as a single coherent thought. With this went syntax, the structure of meaning in ‘word-collections’. Next went the ability to form structured thoughts as essential pieces of communication.
Enter Trump. Raised in reality-TV Trump understood his core demographic of relatively unsophisticated thinkers and readers vastly outnumbered his literate critics, and were susceptible to some very basic tricks. He learned to create and toss into the Twittersphere shiny bits of ‘colourful-plastic-words’ that would reflect off of his audience’s internal prejudices to form apparently meaningful, symmetrical, ‘truths’.
The formula is simple: Crush Enemy Names into scornful Nicknames (‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden) Declaim ours with dramatic emphasis: “Marjorie. Taylor. Greene!”; SCREAM OUR OUTRAGE IN ALL-CAPS; stick to infantile emotions: love and hate, fear and rage. Use gameshow dynamics: Endless Superlatives, Winners and Losers, Us against Them; Winning, always Winning, Boasting and Scorekeeping; “It was a landslide!”
Every tiny word-piece, every lie reflects off prejudice and bias, and, being merely isolated fragments, their reflections ape meaning as they move in circular patterns of random word-association. Constantly reflecting the listener’s own half-formed understandings, adding weight to every conspiracy theory that provides shape to the illusion of meaning.
They needn’t even confirm those prejudices. This is why the failure of conspiracy predictions to materialise doesn’t matter. It only matters that the new pieces reflect again and again, giving new, emotionally exciting patterns that must mean something!
Tapping into the basest emotions means Donnie is hitting those mirrors to reflect the illusion of inclusion, the thrill of shared power to hit back at those we hate and blame for our inadequacies and thwarted ambitions. The tweets are legion. But the same process operates at Trump’s rallies: “Marjorie. Taylor. Greene … we love her … she’s scary … but we love her...”.
Meaning is found where we seek it. And when we have nothing but broken meaning-free words and phrases to work with meaning is invented. Tweets and texts. Tropes and memes. Some assembly required.
Lee Dalton Kear is a retired management consultant, psychotherapist and journalist living in Canberra.
