I was having a conversation recently about the pros/cons of the Internet as social media and how it differs from similar forms throughout history.
Means of individual and group communications sent to an audience–one-to-many or many-to-many as opposed to one-to-one–include: the town crier (ancient BCE up to ~1900 CE), the broadsheet (from ~1700 up to its blending into…), newspapers (from 700s CE by Chinese dynastic governments, then privately produced Chinese media ~1580, from 1500s-1700s by the Italian government, from the 1600s throughout Europe and America), magazines (1600s), fanzines (1800s (!) literary to mid- late-1900s pop culture), TV (1900s), Usenet and BBSs (1970s), blogs (1990s), social media (late 1990s).
The original forms were government-controlled with broad distribution, then later forms were introduced for private groups but with smaller distribution, and ultimately company-controlled with a broad distribution. In the last 50-or-so years the ability for individuals to broadcast to a potentially large audience became more widely available. Broad distribution was accessible only to governments at first, then corporations, and finally individuals. The progress from fanzine to blog to social media were the forms that provided that increasing access.
The ability of the individual to communicate to the many equates to the ability to affect their social environment. The older newspaper, magazine, and TV forms contained consumable information that provided little opportunity for the consumer to produce any of that information. The only means were in the form of popularity feedback via advertisements, or that of letters-to-the-editor filtered through the editors themselves. These are considerably constrained forms of influence.
Affecting your environment provides a sense of agency and control and perhaps reduces feelings of increasingly narrower importance in communities that are increasingly wider. Someone in a small town now more likely understands, via the Internet, that they are only part of a near limitless whole. (This understanding is addressed defectively by Jordan Peterson’s romanticizing of “small, rural communities.”)
The ability to affect your environment comes in different forms. Similar to the broadcast of ideas are the choices to spray paint graffiti or play loud music in a public space: the city controls you and so you try to take some of that control back. This gets maybe into the difference of lower class disaffection and response versus middle class response, but that is probably too simplistic. (Even, further afield, the choice to get a tattoo is a choice to control a body that was given without choice.) In the initial discussion that prompted this entry, we also talked anecdotally about how the game Pong amazed us as children and how, obviously, it appears simplistic. From tinker toys to VR Minecraft. Similar to sending your messages to potential millions, controlling what appeared on a TV screen that was previously consumption-only gave the individual control over previously un-controlled content. The thrill of making dots on a TV screen do what you want comes from the same source that drives us to post a picture of food on Instagram or pass along our belief in a government conspiracy on Facebook. Within every success is a failure.
Updated 8 Feb 2019
Origins of journalism and conservative hatred of journalism in The New Yorker article Does Journalism Have a Future?
Correcting/clarifying my loose reading of Wikipedia history, newspapers qua American newspapers started in the 1830s. Hatred of news by conservatives started earlier than I expected: in the 1950s with McCarthy and heavily in the 1970s by Spirow Agnew (who I recently/embarrassingly just learned was Nixon’s VP pre-Ford and resigned prior to Nixon in a nearly-as-corrupt cloud). He states that “good politics for us to kick the press around” which sounds grindingly similar to Trump’s “fake news” quips”. But we knew that?
And there’s a satisfaction that Bill Kristol denounced the press at the time as fake-news-ish and then the shuttering of the iconic magazine he founded, The Weekly Standard, was celebrated by Trump. What Rick Wilson keenly calls “Everything Trump Touches Dies” I express as a canonical example of a monster eating its creators. Good. Fucking. Riddance. Hate begets destruction.
Notes:
- Jour means day, newspapers were daily, journalism
- TV made newspapers from descriptive to interpretive since tv was visually descriptive
In No thank you, Mr. Pecker, Jeff Bezos reveals that The Enquirer attempted to blackmail him in order to have the newspapestarter he owns (the notable WaPo) stop pursuing stories re their (The Enquirer’s) politically-motivated catch-and-kill activities w/r/t Trump. Representatives for the not-so-notable Enquirer spoke to him about photos they found (“found” being key) with him naked and/and genitally erect with a woman-not-his-wife while wearing his wedding ring, and then sent him emails (holy shit wire fraud!) saying same. He published their threat and the content thereof. Billionaires are justifiably getting shit right now, but his response as the billionaire was satisfying in a hero-we-need way:
Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here. If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?
Jacques Peretti, post modernist, then started Buzzfeed.
Arianna Huffington was anti-feminist
Alan Rusbridger from The Guardian:
Our Generation had been handed the challenge of rethinking almost everything societies had, for centuries, taken for granted about journalism.
This is untrue. Journalism has always been mutable, but we just forget.