If there's a better name for the semantic world, I'd like to hear it.
Steve Sailer and others talk about the Narrative. In small form, the Narrative is about whatever PC elements apply to a particular news story. Trayvon Martin was a victim of stereotyping in the Narrative, for example. In this way, the Narrative is the way we are supposed to think about hot-button topics when they appear.
In a larger sense, the Narrative is about the West's unerring march of progress. Ideas of the past are conquered unconditionally and today is better than all the days before it. We are smarter and more free than we ever have been but we still must do battle with ignorance and oppression. Tomorrow, more false ideas will be defeated and we will be better people than even today.
More people every day are seeing that the Narrative is fiction as what we see in the media becomes more of an alternate universe than a picture of reality. In this separation we can see what I mean by the semantic world.
The thought first came to me in one of my universities. We were studying early colonial writings about the Americas, particularly Amerigo Vespucci's. Vespucci's accounts were salacious, portraying the natives as being lax in apparel and loose in morals. It was advertising, really, to get royal subjects to become colonists but it was also creating an understanding of the Americas in the European mind. It was an expansion of the semantic world.
Operation in the semantic world is most obvious in talk show monologues. Shallow and obvious, the jokes are precisely about what we all are expected to understand. Lindsay Lohan likes drugs. Donald Trump has weird hair.
And, of course, Paula Deen. The old connection was "Paula Deen=butter." "Butter" is "butter=unhealthy food." "Unheathy food±white trash." Paula Deen also equals "Southern," which also plus-or-minus equals "white trash."
Clearly, there weren't too many steps to "racist," so the revelations of her using the Forbidden Word easily attached that association to her. "Racist" is our cultural trump word, the association that blots out all other qualities. Turn on Letterman tonight and see that "Paula Deen=racist."
I don't mean to start talking in formulas; they don't effectively communicate what I mean, anyway. The semantic world is more of a cloud than clear connections.
Semantic connections are both malleable and stubborn. We're reaching the end of the age in which they have been the most manipulated and moving to a time, I think, of battling understandings.
Let me unpack that statement. In our post-Christ era, understanding of the things in the world was dominated by Catholic meaning. The printing press was an opportunity for that understanding to be both spread and challenged by alternative viewpoints. The marketplace of ideas was open to the public.
The marketplace remained free, if limited by means and geography, until the early 20th century as the media industries became centralized profit generators, the era of Hearst and Pulitzer, the movie studios and the broadcast companies. (Europe and Britain were a little further along and a little different but we've ended up in the same place.)
Around the time of WWII--and I heard about this a lot in J-school--the news industry made it a goal to become objective reporters of the day's events, abandoning the proselytizing that was the reason most newspapers were founded.
Looking back, this aspiration to objectivity was more about sales than nobility, no matter what Edward R. Murrow might tell you. Being a Republican paper in a Democratic city limits the number of possible readers. Still, the ensuing generations of reporters were taught with objectivity as an ideal.
An illustrative thumbnail aside: Take the different semantic representations of the reporters in The Front Page and those in All the President's Men. In the former, the reporters are eager to find facts that make a hot story; in the latter, the reporters are out to expose corruption.
The main problem with centralization is that the temptation to abuse one's power is irresistible. As the news and entertainment media became more monolithic, it became too easy to editorialize in subtle ways. Show Dan Quayle staring off into space, maybe. Show footage of the president throwing up into someone's lap. What was someone going to do, turn on ABC instead? They're all showing the same stuff.
The internet is a return to the free marketplace of ideas, where anyone can write a book or make a video and have it available around the world, which is more than any content producer in history ever had. The media conglomerates are scrambling as profits fall and their producers cling to their prestige.
As Big Media declines, we're entering an age in which ideas are battling on a more level field. The cognitive dissonance one feels when watching the news is no longer confined to the individual and his immediate circle--now he can go online and find out just how many people think the Narrative is fictional.
All of this happens in the semantic world, the world of our understandings. The monolithic media understands Paula Deen to be a racist; we understand her to be a victim of a PC witch hunt. The monolithic media understands itself to be a noble force of progress; we understand it to be an alienated echo chamber of elites.
The Narrative will fail because it doesn't fit the world as we already understand it, through our own experiences. It will fail because we bring the realities it ignores to the forefront again and again. It will fail because it's about understanding first, reality second.
The colonists eventually discovered that the natives weren't as licentious as they were led to believe.
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