Phiilip Adams has an opinion piece this morning which is one of those classic big media lamentations about the passing of their control of the audience. This one has a twist because Adams, who made a fortune from advertising, is an acknowledged leading left-wing intellectual in Australia and a long-time proponent of more media diversity.
Adams’ main point is the familiar one that the breakdown in mass media will see a breakdown in society; instead of one conversation there will now be many of them. Our media will become fragmented and our society will become ‘messy’:
we’ll miss mass media when it’s gone. What many saw as dangerously anti-democratic – the domination of press, radio and broadcasting by a few powerful families – may turn out to have had some good points.
The main ‘good point’ revolves around the idea that we the audience can’t really be trusted with all that choice:
It’s good that they have alternatives to oligopoly media – or to the public broadcasters. But too many retreat into a world of media that takes user-friendliness too far. That is, they censor their inputs. They garner their information from the sources and blogs that echo their views, and are deaf and blind to the other side(s) of an argument. For many the widening choice means a narrowing mind.
This ‘echo chamber’ idea has been around for a few years, of course, but there is no evidence for it that I’m aware of it, and Adams doesn’t offer any. With choice, most of us are accessing far more viewpoints than ever before.
A lot of the problem with Adams’ viewpoint is that it is based on the idea that traditional media can’t survive the advent of social media and social networking. Obviously, existing media will have to make major adjustments, including accepting the idea that the audience can no longer be controlled.
Adams’ final paragraph is also not new but I think quite strange:
Mess media will be a problem for governments. How to get an urgent message out about a bushfire? An epidemic? A tsunami? A war? For all its flaws and faults the mass media provided a community notice board. Will government be forced to have a “Big Brother button” to press – a way of interrupting everyone at once?
Strange in the light of the role of Twitter in the aftermath of the Chinese earthquake and also the Obama campaign effort which relied so much on social media and social networking. Last week, I wrote:
Obama’s genius was to put together old-style, person-to-person community-level campaigning with the power of new technologies. He took a pre-television model and welded it to a post mass media technological environment. In doing that, he raised more money than anyone before him, recruited more volunteers, registered more new voters and succeeded in his goal of putting people back into the political process. Obama has re-invented centre-left politics as a participatory activity.
6 Comments
Strange too that he didn’t mention the one thing that really worries me about the seemingly impending loss of a true mass market – the loss of a revenue base that can support investigative journalism. Watching Chris Masters on Enough Rope made me realise just how much that one individual did to improve the political culture in Queensland, just to name one example. Will we see that kind of in-depth investigation in future, and will we miss it?
I would have thought a newspaper stable as large as News Ltd in Australia would be just as much a one man echo chamber as the echo chambers Adams is worrying about. They present all things through the prism of a single particular political view and objective.
If you have the majority newspaper stable by a country mile in Australia with the singular intention of getting the Liberal party reelected how is that better than having blogs that echo a common belief? At least with blogs it is a gathering of the like minded, not an attempt to conver empty minds into a like minds, which these MSM often tend to do through misinformation, omission and lies.
I remember Coonan with Howard’s new media laws that allowed even further and deeper concentration of media ownership basically implying that it would lead to a diversity of views. Is Adams trying to say that the more views that can be expressed in a multiplicity of blogs and other forums that their will be less diversity in views and information?
I think the major risk with the demise of a MSM is that people will be able to avoid the issue of politics entirely and thus will be non informed. But I think that is the case anyway. People not interested in politics pay no attention and turn off to political discussion and remain just as ill informed.
Having one man trying to elect a government that suits his political leanings is not better than whatever would replace him.
Mike – I think the investigative journalism issue is the real one in transferring from mass-controlled media to mass-participation media. I hoping that this will be offset to some extent by public broadcasters who don’t need a business revenue model and by the creation of a more transparent and accountable environment overall from all those ‘citizen journalists’
Philip Adams is an old-fashioned media monopolist.
Trevor – surely investigative journalism is going to increasingly be provided by citizen journalism itself? we could be at the beginning of a new era of amateur-professional investigators… with Tintin as the new hero ..
The thing is investigative journalism has been on its way out in mass-controlled media for some time now. The effect of oligopoly-globalisation of media and the subordination of all other ethics, including journalist codes of conduct, to the corporate profit ethic. which has pissed people off.
So its not social media wat dun it but the silly corporate buggers strangling their golden goose. Just like Hollywood producers and finance corporates [whatever they're called] they only seem to know how to respond Pavlov-like to profits and only get advice from people who think like themselves – so they don’t get it – they lack insight, lack criticality, lack creativity, lack the big picture, lose touch, and even lack risk management. And its not as if this phenomenon hasn’t been talked about ad infinitum… House of cards if you ask me.
The tragedy is that ‘independent’ forms of media are monopolised as much as, maybe more, than established media networks. Simply because independent forms tend to attract young and inexperienced voices who, while bursting with energy, haven’t been around long enough to know just exactly what lengths others will go to.