We are experiencing what the Constitution authors most feared: Democracy.
The Democracy comes in the form of everyone getting his or her own news.
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This blog received an interesting e-mail from one of its readers, curious about the post regarding Facebook shaming of a candidate for Portland City Council. (The post had reported that Facebook commenters piled on, one after another, in objection to him, noting as their sole objection that he was a white male. The blog wrote that race-based delegitimization was a form of openly acknowledged "reverse-discrimination" and that it engendered white backlash, and was dangerous policy and politics.)
The email said he could not find, via Google, any mention of the controversy. "Is this just a social media phenomenon?"
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| Social media is media. |
That sentence would have made perfect sense in the recent past, but no longer.
Social media phenomena are not "just" anything. Social media is media. Social media is news. Social media is the truth and reality for a great many people. It shapes how one thinks of the broader media. The dustup finally did make its way to the "real" media, a story in Willamette Week, but in reality the reach of Facebook can dwarf the reach of a print newspaper. Willamette Week's story did not make it legitimate news. The story was covered by Willamette Week because the Facebook dustup was newsworthy.
Social media is how an increasing number of people get their news. Donald Trump claims 110 million followers on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. The number is closer to 93 million. But still, 93 million. He is vivid, interesting, outrageous, newsworthy, persuasive to many, and he shapes the news day after day.
Facebook is the single most important source of news for young voters. People get their own news feeds, which they create on their own.
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Russian hackers and trolls did not need to buy ads on television to shape American thinking. They created stories which Americans read and spread voluntarily among their family, friends, and groups of like minded people. Americans need not fear Russians. They are no worse or different from ones neighbors or Facebook Friends. News you can use. News that seems oddly tailored to your thinking, because it is in fact tailored to your thinking.
News has been democratized. Democracy is not mediated by curation or expertise or experience other than ones own. As this blog has learned from experience by posting links to this blog in Facebook groups, the groups seek affirmation and confirmation of their thinking.
The power of social media may have been an unexpected accident of new technologies. It took place in a unique media and business environment, Fox News and talk radio learning that there is a big business opportunity in serving the large niche of openly conservative, populist thinking. Added to that is Trump's own experience and skill in the tabloid news culture of New York. Americans are drawn to smackdown news. They say they don't like it or believe it, but they watch it and they are, in fact, influenced by it. And they circulate it to their Friends and Followers.
Donald Trump has very successfully defined the established and curated news media as partisan liars, purveyors of fake news, news that is less credible than the news one gets from the trusted sources of family, friends, and Fox News. This fits the business model of Fox very nicely, providing them a big niche in a fractured market: Fox versus everyone else. It suits Trump. Who do you believe, Trump or the NY Times? Trump gets his share of believers.
Trump is addressing some of the biggest possible issues in America: who are Americans? Will we be at war or peace? How do we handle taxes, immigration, health care, wealth distribution, addictions, policing? There is no shared institution in America that retains widespread credibility--except that historically most dangerous one, the military. The established credible sources have been discredited and are ignored, so Facebook and Twitter and Instagram are as real, or more real, than they.
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| Trump is winning this war |
America has democratized its media. We create our own Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. The tendency of self-created media is toward confirmation bias. Unmediated group thinking leads toward intemperance. In a crisis, democracies have sought a strong unifying leader, presenting himself as the person exemplifying and expressing the general will of the people.
The Constitution expected the solution to democracy's fragility was a republican form of government. We choose leaders and the ambition of those leaders blocks and moderates the ambition of others. There was an assumption built into this, that multiple leaders have credibility in the form of a shared reality, and Enlightenment idea that the truth was discoverable.
Democratized media means that Enlightenment idea is forgotten. We are in an age of Faith, and everyone gets to create his or her own.
3 comments:
FOX is not news. I call it "shaped narrative".
By cherry picking facts and extrapolating into fiction one can create a plausible story that a gullible audience will buy. This is more Hollywood scripting than actual journalism which Fox does not do. Fox is all opinion and speculation, presented as revealing conspiracies that play into the Regressive world view.
If there was an authority that policed such things, FOX would not be allowed to attach "news" to it's logo.
It seems there is nothing on the horizon to alter this trajectory. Applied AI is getting better and better at predicting our patterns, producing a snowball effect. I suspect even the purveyors of what some might think of as extreme ideals; people like Bannon, Spencer and Hannity, are themselves vulnerable to and are in fact products of the siloing effect of this shift in sources of “facts”.
This post is spot on. The Founders chose a republican form of government after the Revolution, fearing an "excess of democracy," a.k.a. anarchy (read "Hamilton," for one). As the headline alludes to, but the article does not discuss, we lack a shared truth or identity as Americans (first) rather than as primarily Ds, Rs, progressives, conservatives, ____ (insert your intersectional identity identification here), sniping at each other from the comfort of our news silos. It is easier to be descriptive than prescriptive, Peter. What is the solution for the technological, cultural predicament we find ourselves in?
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