In linguistics, “indexing” means establishing things within the context of a conversation.
So if I say “I” while chatting with you over coffee, you know I’m referring to myself. If you were to read the word “I” in a novel, though, it might refer to the narrator or one of the characters who’s dialoguing. Different contexts, different indexes for that word.
If we’re chatting about the weather and I mention a storm front that’s about to roll through, you would know what I mean by “it” later in the conversation (“Have you made any preparations for it?”) because of that earlier indexing of the storm as “it.”
We index within larger, cultural contexts, as well. If someone says “Madonna” in a conversation (in the broadly defined Western world, at least), it’s unlikely they’d need to specify which Madonna they’re talking about. And some theories of media suggest that by dominating these macro cultural spaces, ensuring you’re pre-indexed in every conversation, you can guide or control essentially all culture-wide discussions from that point forward.
Imagine, if you can, a politician (or collection of political actors) who go out of their way to be involved in every possible news cycle—it’s a stretch, I know.
Even if this person (or people) is being criticized, they’re still shaping what we talk and think about, and that gives them power over what happens next.
Everything we do, say, or plan occurs within the cultural context they influence, and that means ideas and even ideologies that are orthogonal to them (never intersecting with the narratives of which they’re a part) are no longer on the table; it becomes difficult to have a conversation that doesn’t somehow involve them and their priorities, even if we might benefit from having such conversations.
These people become the default “they” in every conversation without us having to specify who we’re talking about. They sculpt our shared reality into their preferred shape by manipulating how we talk and think, and that makes it difficult to consider possibilities that exist or originate outside the parameters they’ve established.
As a result, the more we fixate on these pre-indexed entities, the more limited the scope of our thinking (and thus, doing) becomes.
None of which means we shouldn’t keep tabs on what’s going on in the world around us, including the communication channels through which these indexes are disseminated and reinforced.
I would argue, however, that it’s vital we carve out space in our lives for thinking, being, and doing that defies pre-indexing; that we make room for passions and beliefs and undertakings that are immaterial to those who have claimed the largest megaphones—even though such things can seem trivial, at times, and even though not everyone (including those leading the day’s discourse) will consider them to be worthy of effort and attention.
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