The recent terrorist shooting in South Carolina have brought the issue of racism back to the top of the heap in the mainstream media. I’m sure there will be deep introspective think pieces in all of the major dailies and magazines. Then, like any story the media deigns “having being milked enough”, the racist terrorist attack will be quietly shunted to the side while the next tragedy is cued up for consumption.
Consumption of news these days seems to be the problem though. We are expected to keep track of the world, hell even personalize our ‘news experience’, but that is not what being an educated, engaged member of society is all about. The 5th Estate is (should) there to monitor the centres of power in society and report their activities for the citizens of democratic countries can engage with and evaluate said activities. With so much of media today being focused on infotainment rather than critical analysis of important events how the the average citizen get the information she needs?
There are a couple of threads to pull apart with the questions being raised. Firstly, the idea that personalized news is good idea for democratic societies, secondly the role of infotainment media and lastly the effect of the professional media colluding with the centers of power in society. All three of these aspects work against the creation of active, informed democratic participation in society.
“Society” is the watchword here – the ludicrous amount of personalization options presented to us in North America society gives us choice – and we all know (or should know by now the neo-liberal taint associated with that concept) that the choice presented to us is really a form of atomization that keeps our fingers firmly off the pulse of society and rather, firmly on our own as we sail alone through society.
What comes to mind is an captioned black and white image (pro-tip:if you want to every reuse something save it the first time you see it) of people on a train all
A big tip of the hat to Bleatmop for tracking down this picture.
reading the paper. The witty caption was something like this – smartphones and technology have changed society darn much… You can see the obvious parallel being made; every buried in a newspaper vs. everyone buried in their smart phones. On the surface this is correct but I remember pausing then thinking that something wasn’t quite right.
That “something” was that reading the daily newspaper was a still a shared experience in society. You could talk to someone about an article, even a complete stranger, and it was likely that they would have read the same article and then you could start a conversation about it. How neat is is that? Today though, that is a much taller order as many people have tailored their consumption of news to their tastes and sphere of interests making finding a common ground with people that much more difficult. Talking to people about important issues is what community is about, especially when they have different views on what is the correct course of action. Hashing things out, being charitable, accepting an well reasoned argument are all part of living in a democratic society.
Democracy is not a streamlined affair, nor should it be, because our personal freedom and ethical concerns are at stake. When governments act unilaterally and secretly it doesn’t matter what personal choices you make, it is the society around you that is going to shit and your choosy-choices and personal experiences will also be circling the drain since you are part of said society(see Canadian bill C-51, NAFTA, Trans-Pacific-Partnership). So having a reliable, accessible, common base of public knowledge is important to democratic society.
Democratic society has given us many media choices but, coupled with the capitalist infrastructure that actually runs the show our media sources have conglomerated and become ensconced within the power structures of society. See Fox and Faux News for the most shining example of the marriage between news and corporate propaganda. The focus of much of our news media today is to sell advertising, while educating/informing the public on crucial issues facing society is quite far down the list. I shudder when I see how much of the professional media now resembles Entertainment Tonight rather than the venerable Front Page Challenge (The Fifth Estate, Marketplace, et cetera). It now takes a great deal of time just to filter out the dross to get to the important news that people should know about their society and even then one must take into account the bias and elite influence present within ‘serious news’. The importance of public broadcasters cannot be overstated here – public institutions such as the CBC, NPR, and BBC are more free from the elite consensus and can more accurately report on the issues without the elite’s point of view being considered the default (This is a relative judgment – see Media Lens for an annotated listing of how awesomely independent Auntie Beebs is becoming).
Public broadcasting, with all of its problems aside, is one avenue to escape ‘the preferred message’ being broadcast to society by the corporate media with their vested interests of the status-quo. This isn’t a wild conspiracy theory – the way the world currently works benefits a certain class of people and it is their best interests to maintain the current system because it keeps them at the top of the heap. No mystery present. This system also provides the answers to why certain problems keep cropping up again and again within society – inequality, institutionalized racism and sexism for example. There structures within society serve their purpose; the ‘right people’ profit from their existence and thus are maintained. Just look at the perspectives surrounding mass murders:
The evidence, but then put through the media filters and the very different result…
The NYT’s nails it, for once, and lays down a view into the systemic racism that permeates North American society. This is the story that needs constant repetition. Yet, watch how soon the white racial violence dissipates into the ether. This is not a fluke, not a statistical aberration, this is policy. And thus, because of the collusion of much of the media with the current centres of power, the problems that face our society are not adequately dealt with nor are they given the proper amount of time or analysis that would help the people of the nation understand these problems and what can be done about them.
For those in power though it wise to note that only so much tamping down of these systemic problems can be done. Eventually, these issues take a life of their own and people will take radical action to resolve these seemingly ‘intractable’ problems and not in the way that the nestled elite likes.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
1 comment
June 24, 2015 at 10:50 am
Sedate Me
This is such a diverse, content-rich, thought provoking, story. No wonder nobody else in this 8 second attention span universe has posted a response. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadians-now-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-portable-devices-microsoft-study Here is but one of my many thoughts on your story.
“(R)eading the daily newspaper was a still a shared experience in society. You could talk to someone about an article, even a complete stranger, and…they would have read the same article and then you could start a conversation about it.
This is exactly what I keep telling everyone. But all I get is stupid looks/comments from iDiots who (like that newspaper photo) desperately try to claim traditional media “is just as bad” as their hand-held crack dispensers. It’s just NOT true! It’s like saying water and heavy water from nuclear plants are the same. (Note the clever radiation parallel.)
TV is the last bastion of “shared experience”. Watching traditional broadcast TV was a shared experience, not just between everyone in the room, but within the entire society. Whatever you saw, you were almost guaranteed 25% of the public saw it at the same time as you did. Never mind an entire nation, even just a room full of people can’t watch a cell-phone together. And because it commands all their attention, even a person using a cell-phone in a room full of people watching TV can’t really have a “shared experience”. Using hand-held devices is ALWAYS an isolating experience.
But let’s pretend an entire nation somehow winds up seeing the exact same thing on their hand-held devices. They still do it as individuals; in their own time & space. And they’re ALWAYS alone, even if surrounded by other people. But even if this could ever happen, it could take decades to compile the amount of 2nd Rate “shared experience” that old-fashioned, network TV, broadcasting used to do EVERY SINGLE NIGHT! Not only that, these people will be largely unaware (and probably wouldn’t care) that they’ve “shared” an experience. But by the time everyone “shares” it, most people will have long forgotten what they are supposedly “sharing” anyway. Just imagine how many other skateboarding cat videos will have come along in the meantime.
For example, Orange Is The New Black is the most watched show on Insta-Flick-Me-Net-Craving. However, it may NEVER get the total accumulated viewership (on any kind of screen) that Bonanza compiled during the 60’s alone. (37% of America watched it LIVE every week.) The population then was about 2/3 of what it is today. It was also a time when people actually had lives and would even occasionally venture outside their homes. But it’s still a very safe bet that every single North American alive during its TV run saw at least 3-4 episodes (far more if you include syndicated re-runs in the 70’s) . But unless a major TV network picks it up, Orange Is The New Black will probably be lucky to surpass Chico & The Man or, (keeping with the Lorne Greene theme) the original Battlestar Galactica.
Even though everybody can theoretically access anything any time they like, the media landscape is too splintered, saturated, and too personally tailored for “shared experiences” to regularly occur. Even the TV landscape is now too fractured to provide consistent “shared experiences”.
What we’re building is a society in the Margaret Thatcher model. “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Without shared experiences, there can be no common ground, no common purpose and no honest discussions . And in such a divided society, where nobody can relate to each other, there can no democratic government worth anything. Even if you manage to separate folks from their digital masturbation, the political climate will always be nothing but individuals and small demographic tribes competing in self-interested battles based upon 15 minutes worth of thought . Such a disinterested & splintered dynamic also makes it easy for the power of government to be captured by a small cabal with a narrow agenda. Oops, it’s already happened!
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