What Does the Media Do, Really?

If you’ve come here looking for answers, “all hope abandon, ye who enter here.” What you will find is an attempt to clarify questions, discover new lines of inquiry, perhaps some bit of understanding, and maybe – just maybe – a possible way forward.

So, what does the media do, really?

To ask that is to ask, what is media?

The technical definition, per the Oxford English Dictionary, is: 

The main means of mass communication, esp. newspapers, radio, and television, regarded collectively; the reporters, journalists, etc., working for organizations engaged in such communication. Also, as a count noun: a particular means of mass communication. Cf. medium n. 4d, mass media n.

What’s not found in that definition is an additional label that is rarely used yet well understood by people who work in it, for it, or run it. Media is a species of business.

Now when I say that nice, smart people I know, give a surprisingly energetic response. If it’s not exactly disagreement, a form of objection. The intelligentsia, the general public, democrats, republicans, right and left, liberal and conservative all grant media a special, almost revered place, in the business ecosystem.

It has impact and influence in ways that other businesses don't. But is that true?

It can be argued that the energy business (oil and electricity, etc.), agribusiness, the fast-food industry, and others all have influence on populations as much as the media. But those influences aren’t as easy to see, or readily available in visible form. Media, on the other hand, has a kind of ubiquity that is noticeable with little effort on the part of someone wanting to notice it.

But there IS something different about it as a business. For one, good or bad, media is how most of us experience and come to know the world. Aside from things that happen to us or happen around us, what do we really know about the world that we didn’t get from someone else through the media? 

To look at media as a business like other powerful industries suggests in part devaluing what we know.

But think about it. The likes of Tucker Carlson are not there to dispense data or interpret it into information, or even share knowledge. Rachel Maddow is not just on a mission to help people better understand their world. As part of a media business apparatus, what they do is make money selling a product – LOTS of money. In the case of media, the product is the attention of viewers sold to advertisers.

Attention is hard to gain when the lure requires complexity. The media ecologist Neal Postman in his best-known work Amusing Ourselves to Death called us, “Great Abbreviators.” He was thinking of Aldus Huxley’s forward to A Brave New World Revisited:

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand—but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formatted notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

This is the worst thing modern media does best. And while Postman writes that we haven’t the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believe we did, or an audience too gullible as to accept it,” the degree we abbreviate, using a shorthand to convey feelings and impressions (we can’t in good faith call them ‘ideas’ or even ‘thoughts’ or ‘thinking’) is so extreme and carried so far that we have many people who claim to know the whole truth, convey it with a tweet or meme, and distribute to an audience of believers that number in size previously unimaginable.  

When Huxley published A Brave New World Revisited it was 1958. TV had recently become the dominant medium. When Postman published in 1985, cable TV was still growing up. The first basic cable network launched in 1976. ESPN debuted in September of 1979, CNN less than a year later. MTV a year after that. A little less than half (46%) of US homes received cable TV. A little over 20% of households had a VCR. The average number of TV channels receivable that year was 19. Desktop computers were just making their way into offices and homes.

There was no email or internet for anyone but the most technologically inclined. Atari was the exemplar of video game entertainment, with Commodore 64 being for only the advanced aficionados. 

Today there are 37 million channels on YouTube, with more than a billion hours of video being watched every day. A 256GB mobile device has 2 million times the capacity as the Commodore 128 PC introduced at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) at the beginning of 1985. As of October 2021, there are 200,756,193 active websites. The average person spends a bit over 13 hours a day with media.

Most of us now have instantaneous access to nearly all conceivable data. As Chuck Klosterman notes in But What if We’re Wrong? “[a]ll feasible ideas and every possible narrative exist together, and each new societal generation can scoop out a bucket of whatever antecedent is necessary to support their contemporary conclusions.” Just because media can make equal access possible, it does not render what is accessed and those doing the accessing equally valid.  If there is a circumstance where there exists “all facts,” all facts mean everything is provable, even untruth.  

To succeed as a business, media in general is not interested in "right" or "wrong," "fact" or "non-fact." It is interested only in gaining and keeping attention. That attention yields from narrative tension and conflict. People become unsettled, angry, afraid... whatever it takes to keep the limbic system in a state of agitation. This ensures the rational mind doesn't get an opportunity to do much. An irrational agent is more prone to consume in the mindless fashion necessary to keep the old economic engines burning. Media then doles out a little entertainment to sedate so we can come down from the anxiety high, get refreshed, and be put back into the cycle.

As a business, media sells a product. It isn’t content – entertainment or information. As mentioned above, media’s product is attention. It grows and harvests it from audiences. To do that, it feeds and waters audiences with content. The quality of that content consumption experience directly contributes to the quality of that product — attention — sold to advertisers. The highest quality of attention is brow-furrowing engagement. That kind of engagement comes most from friction. That friction results when only two concepts rub up quickly against each other without the goal of reconciliation or the tempering factor of additional perspective.

Nothing exemplifies this better than social media and media transmitted digitally.  

New media takes a highly non-randomized collection of decontextualized facts and frames them in a way to incite and inflame, not inform and explain (this is a regular theme of mine you will start to see often). To do the latter would take more time but result in the content consumer taking what they've learned and moving on with their lives. Doing the former keeps the content consumer emotional and undecided, off-kilter and uncertain, wanting more to either be relieved or to stoke the emotional fire kindled. It’s a model that connects algorithms to the outcome of optimization against time of engagement. That has led to an automated system of engagement through enragement (think Tucker Carlson on the right or Bob Cesca on the left) by means of highly non-randomized and decontextualized negative fact (that may not be “fact” at all). 

This is not the result of a bunch of evil men twirling their mustaches in smoke-filled rooms plotting the subjugation of civilization to their will. It is endemic of the binary ethos that pervades all of culture, in the tools used to communicate and represent itself, e.g., computers (and their corollary Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, etc.) to the way the culture is run. Politics, business, relationships, discourse; by making those engagements 1s or 0s, they can be rendered into machine-readable form so they can be automated and optimized. All our engagements now have become “either/or” even when the world is really a place of “also/and.” But also/and is complicated and much harder to subject to a blunt algorithm.

What’s to be done?

There’s no going back. While severing the media business model from the algorithm would do wonders, suggesting it is akin to putting toothpaste back in the tube. The best we can hope for is to teach people how to brush their teeth and advise against swallowing excessive amounts of paste.

One way of doing this could be “slow” news, or what we’re calling “slow journalism.” Slow journalism means taking the time to decide what is covered, why, when, and how. To treat issues of the day with the deference and deliberation they deserve, and to give ourselves time to figure out just which issues those are. That media is a business naturally leads to ways for it to make more money, faster. “Slow” journalism lends itself to being more wholly baked, more deliberate, and therefore, is potentially more thoughtful and error free. And the pace might just make one less ‘anxious,’ leaving fear and anger further back in the line of responses to what’s going on in our world and how we come to know it.

Each new mode of communication caused anxiety for the people for whom those modes were new. When writing first emerged, the anxiety was that people would lose the art and penchant for memory and oration. Turns out that’s what happened; but the trade-off was the development and evolution of collective intelligence over shorter periods of time, which led to the overall long-term betterment of larger numbers of people. The printing press came with its own anxieties -- lowering the friction of producing and disseminating ideas meant that more ideas, good AND bad, were made available to larger swaths of people. Again, this worry was borne out, but, again, the tradeoff was worth it. And then there's TV, and computers... and the Internet... and so on. It’s important now that we remain vigilant that these developments are not in exchange for diminishing returns on their social value, that change is unaccompanied by progress, that standards are consistently lowered. Sure, a million people can be made aware of, say, a boycott against Goya beans, or Chick-Fil-A. Millions can become slacktivists for the cause of bringing their chosen advocacy to a large audience. But plenty of people are still buying Goya beans. Yes, a person can let hundreds and thousands of people know at the same time, the world over, what they think and believe. But to what end? Media as it exists wants us to continue making these kinds of exchanges until what we give up is our most valuable assets – our attention, our time, ourselves -- in exchange for nothing more than how we can give that medium even more of our time and ourselves.

Maybe slow journalism is nothing more than a finger in the dike. But all it takes is a brief respite brought on by one small act that could save the whole world from flood.