Typing looks like thinking

So does writing, handwriting, maybe even more that typing, which may look like operating a machine, which does not necessarily involve any thinking.

I started thinking (or typing) on this theme today, after flipping through the comments section of the nth news item I read today, which was about the latest poll figures from Iowa . If you've been these 'comments' recently, you've probably noticed that they seem increasingly to be produced by people working for one or another of the candidates.

Many of these posters may be unpaid volunteers instructed at the campaign headquarters about how and what to post as part of their democracy-minded enthusiasm to get the candidate of their 'choice' elected. The result is that there are a lot of well-researched yet somewhat generic posts which need only have the minutest connection to the theme and tenor of the article they are 'commenting' on.

These msm comments sections have obviously become an integral forum for electioneering. What I wanted to comment on in my own space in my own blog (please feel free to comment below)is the veneer of independent and coherent thought that gives the comments in the comments section the merest credibility in the first place, which is, McLuhan would likely concur, all due to the uniformity of type.

Imagine, if you will, all this copy-and-pasting of statistics, names and references going on, if we had to do it by hand with original documents and scissors and glue. It would be pretty hard to get a credible-looking document together. The ferocious and desperate creativity which goes into the creation of these generic opinion-missives is invisible behind the uniform type of the css. As is the election machine, or lack of one, behind the poster's name.

ssssssoooooo ttttttthhhhhheeeeee uniform typeface which looks like thinking makes possible all manner of new subterfuge. No better and no worse that any old subterfuge. And more positively, it has a certain leveling effect, whereby, trained and backed electioneering (or otherwise campaigning) posters' subterfuge look pretty well the same as that of any individuals. (are there any still out there? and, why do you even bother? you know the only people who have anything substantial to say get ground out of the process early on.)

I guess people still post on their own initiative sometimes 'because they can', because the technology allows them to experience a certain leveling in the appearance of authority and cogency in the uniform typeface of the comments section. Andy Warhol celebrated the fact that the the Coca Cola I drink is the same Coca Cola the president drinks. Can we also see this 'democratic' (Warhol would say 'American') leveling in electronic repeatable type?