Posts tagged social media

Emily Bell’s response to the feverish wait for the report of the Leveson Enquiry into press ethics in the UK is as brilliant as it is restrained. She thoroughly debunks the notion of what localised national governments can pretend to achieve in addressing the pan-global nature of digitised communications but refrains from outright mocking of our political class’s old-fashioned attachment to what they describe as “the press”. Critically, though, she raises the spectre of how an archaic political class might respond to their frustrated impotence: striking out bluntly at social media organisations and hastening the road to regulation that could cripple a free internet. [ read it ]

A few decades ago, a paradigm shift in message mediation occurred when television first enabled a greater sense of intimacy between the leaders and the led and duly rewarded the handsome JFK smile and punished Nixon’s five-o-clock shadow.

More recently in the US, President Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign was regarded as a new media exemplar. Commentators buzzed about how politicians could now speak “over” the traditional media and directly to their electorate. This process was refined further for Obama’s re-election as a small army of data analysts pored over our click histories for the smallest clue of what might best stimulate our serotonin flows.

All the while we have been busy embedding ourselves ever deeper within a net of peer-to-peer interconnectedness, taking our relationship with our leaders to a new level. We are now wired together by hyperlinks of consent, and it feels as though our brands and icons are making themselves at home inside us — as permanent fixtures of our hinterland.

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Judging by Facebook comments alone it seems that making content free only magnifies the power of stupid exponentially. The responses to pieces posted by even so-called “highbrow” journals like New Yorker, New Scientist or Economist suggests that most of the new readers recruited through social media are basically as dumb as nuts. Their capacity to misinterpret and butcher even the simplest concept is infinite and varied. Mediation is futile … the median and the mean appear to have become the message. Question is: will this new un-demographic force the content of these titles down into the dumber zone through sheer force of its clicks?