The Spectator

Letters | 23 November 2017

Also in Letters: who follows Corbyn, Edwina Currie on I’m a Celebrity and why fishermen fish

issue 25 November 2017

The medium is the message

Sir: In his piece about the tech-savvy Labour party, Robert Peston writes: ‘A party’s values and messages matter. But in today’s digital Babel, they are probably less important than how the message is presented and to whom it is communicated’ (‘Corbyn 2.0’, 18 November).

Some of your readers may remember the late Marshall McLuhan who in the 1960s coined the phrase ‘The medium is the message.’ I’ve always thought this to have been prescient for its time and it has become ever more pertinent. It is an enormous downside to the digital age that the means of transmitting data is more important than its content.
Geoff Neden

Diddlebury, Shropshire

Corbyn’s ‘followers’

Sir: Robert Peston’s piece on elections and social media was sensationally well written and researched. He made one wrong assumption, though: that every ‘follow’ on Twitter is an endorsement of the politician or party’s views.

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