Sunday, January 10, 2021

Trump's cybernetic circle: Twitter and television

Maggie Haberman, Stripped of Twitter, Trump Faces a New Challenge: How to Command Attention, NYTimes, Jan. 10, 2021:

In some way, television became the medium through which he could watch the effects of his tweets.

The television in his alcove dining room off the Oval Office was usually on in the background, catnip for his short attention span. He consumed much of his information through it and watched the coverage of his tweets.

Mr. Trump’s White House aides said he loved tweeting and then watching the chyrons on cable news channels quickly change in response. For a septuagenarian whose closest allies and aides say often exhibits the emotional development of a preteen, and for whom attention has been a narcotic, the instant gratification of his tweets was hard to match.

I analyzed the relationship between Trump's tweeting and his television viewing in a blog post from 2018: Trumposaurus Rex @ 3QD – Toward a cybernetic interpretation, which is part of a working paper on Trump, Trump Works the Presidency: Imperial Boss and Cyborg Operator.

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