On Media, Audiences, Linked Flows Of Information and Major Change

Via Jay Rosen of the Pressthink blog:

The People Formerly Known as the Audience

That’s what I call them. Recently I received this statement …

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this:

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Here’s the initial thought-provoking post which led me to the above piece.  Following that, the rest of Jay Rosen’s piece is something you really should read.

I remain impressed by the ongoing determination of so many to believe that this hyperlinked interconnected internetthingy is something different and powerful, a harbinger of democracy in increasingly authoritarian and manipulative times.  Most of the time this is what I want to believe, and tell myself (and so, like all of us, find evidence to bolster my beliefs).  The rest of the time I believe that we are only just entering the initial zone of Toffler’s Powershift - Knowledge, Wealth and Power at The Edge Of The 21st Century, and that all of the head-nodding for the past 20 years about the new paradigm of the Information Age was in tacit agreement with the private thought that "this won’t affect me".

As the pox-laden virii of new forms of  "mass production" begin to pullulate on the office doors and desk-bound assembly lines of what is termed "old media", and as the heat and light (if not real power) of the masses with publishing tools in their hands begins to be noticed (Politics, journalism, traditional advertising, education), I notice two things …

1 … the antibodies and immune system are really big, and are spread out everywhere

2 … in addition to rejecting the foreign substance / bodies / players, the extant system is also trying to swallow "it" … eat it so that the fever will be killed.

I also remain fascinated by the ongoing attempts to apply reductionist analysis to this writhing Guernican blob (as Thomas de Zengotita terms the media morass in which we (literally) live, work and play, in his book Mediated - How The Media Shapes Your World and the way You Live In It ), as it adds arms, legs, hearts, minds, words, pictures, videos and non-DJ voices … we want so badly to understand it, to "nail" it, to master it, to use it before (or while) it uses us.

This last fascination has been a durable one.  Notwithstanding what have seemed like endless proclamations of constant change for the past two decades (much of which I worked in the area of organizational change), so very often it seems like so very little has changed. I have many times observed that most systems and organizations are actually in a state of constant low-grade rolling change, with bursts of pandemonium in between.  Nevertheless, every upcoming change is  marketed to those who will feel its impact as the next "solution".  What is it with our need for solutions ? It seems mainly like a mindset to me.  I guess it’s better to believe that than to worry constantly about who might move your cheese ?

Much like the emperor’s clothes, people who read drivel like Who Moved My Cheese mistake the books’ naive and moronic simplicity for a higher truth—that if something is so simple and popular, it must be really deep and compex. It is the equivalent of a literary mirage, and that fact that we have bought 12 million copies of it is a collective exercise in global stupidity.

What do I mean ?  Here I’ll beg your indulgence, dear reader, as I am likely to be all fumbly-inarticulate (believe me, I have been trying to express what I think about this, with little success, for about twenty years).  Here’s how I think about this:

• Homo sapiens, while (relatively) a recent newcomer to the planet, has been around for quite a while (thousands and thousands of years, and more)
• While history tells us that conquerors roamed far afield (go look someday at the maps of Genghis and Kublah Khan’s peregrinations, or Alexander’s, or the spread of the Roman empire at the height of Constantinople’s glory), almost all human activity was intensely local and social contact was limited to one’s family, clan and village.
• Forget about history .. as a generality, people didn’t move around all that much until the 20th Century.
• While we will never know differently, it’s usually believed that the Industrial Revolution, aided by advances in science, engineering and social arrangement concepts like division of labour and mass production for mass markets, led to much more widespread  prosperity and better living conditions. The virus known as human beings began to multiply more and more rapidly (I did say we’ll never know differently, given that compounding likely means that even absent the Industrial Revolution, we still might number more than 6 billions .. who knows, absent wars with tanks, cannons and airplanes and killing fields, maybe there’d be even more of us !)
• Without the constant and full-surround information flows that today’s media offer us, there was literally much that we did not know .. and / or that it was not our place to know. I repeat …  it was "not our place to know".
• Our societies were structured to reflect and reinforce this … the march from clans to villages to fiefdoms and kingdoms, intertwined with the powerful upper ranks of the churches are still, imo, the dominant design principles for society … hence the troublesome impact of events like Luther’s 95 Theses in the early 1500’s, the printing press,  and any outbreaks of earnest liberalism, egalitarianism, call it what you will (oh, the French revolution or the bolsheviks, whatever … some attempt or other by some ne’er-do-welll who dared to question authority and ask why things couldn’t be different, fairer (hehe, want some amusement ? Go read this Dog-Philosopher fable about the audacity of a philosopher (Diogenes) who masturbates in the town square because the town’s welfare system won’t feed him, or something like that)

I believe we tend to forget that the age of monarchs and  ruling families and classes that dominated a nation or society is only back ten generations or less (and that in the supposedly modern 21st century on planet earth we still have many autocratic, or monarchic, or oligo-plutocratic governing systems).

And I believe that we toss off the aphorism "knowledge is power" much much too lightly.  Or maybe it’s just that we are all realizing how cynical a statement that tends to be ?

While I don’t want to denigrate the role of careful analysis (scientific or otherwise) in the process of understanding and using information and technology, I do recognize that any and all tools that will help those in charge of the main systems can and will be used to maintain and grow the status quo and its evil offspring.   The necessary knowledge will be kept hidden or quiet (hey .. how many times have you heard some pundit or wag (like John Dean) say "This Bush Administration is one of the most secretive in modern times" .. nah, you don’t believe that, do you ?  W says he believes a lot in transparency, and if you really pushed him, he’d probably allow as it’s hard work indeed).

What’s that French aphorism ?  Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose (The more things change, the more things stay the same).

This is crazy-making, for me.  Why ?  Because it doesn’t take long to look around and see how much things have changed in the last twenty or thirty years, let alone the last five … and because it also doesn’t take long to look around and notice how much has not changed, and / or is in the process of actively resisting change.

Technologies change, materials change, methods change, ways of living and being change … so why is it that social systems and patterns and structures change so little in their deep structure, or in the face of large amounts of rapidly-moving information may even regress in order to try to simplify and control.

Where is it, or was it, in the march through the last 100 years or so of rapid technological invention and implementation, that we lost the ability to stay firmly and rootedly connected to ourselves ?  And in so doing (by and large losing that ability, becoming atomized, alienated, etc.) gave up the rhythms and beats of deep sociality ?  Does having friends and connections on all five continents, that I can speak to, see or send messages to at any time of the day or night, or pop in to visit for a day or two after a long jet-fueled flight … does that replace living in the same town, or on the same street with the same neighbours, kids growing up together, etc. for 20 years ?

Well … yes, it does … and no, it doesn’t.  Today, it is different, for me.   I know that I am a privileged rich Westerner, and that what I am writing applies mainly, or mostly, to my fellow rich white Westerners.  I am also old enough, and have been through enough life experiences, to know that i don’t feel rich, or privileged, other than as an intellectual exercise (and I am one of the lucky ones … good friends with those parents and in-laws still alive, in good nick with siblings and old friends, engaged in a healthy, loving primary relationship, eat well, sleep well, live simply but stay out of debt, and so on). 

I SHOULD feel rich, and I often tell myself that I live a luxurious (and pretty darned free) life. 

But, just as often I feel sad, and it’s a discouraged, resigned kind of sad.  I wish so very much that I felt more a part of a society, a community … and this is what I see changing all around me and us.   All the while that everyone is working furiously to grow, to have more, to understand, to figure it out, to name. classify, manage, control and predict how things will be .. .this is what is keeping us from connecting with each other and figuring out with commons-derived sense, what to do and how to do it.

The construction and overlay of systems of systems (such as schools, highways, factories, mass markets and mass marketing, hierarchical arrangements of official knowledge and accepted routes of power) is manmade, just as is the hyperlinked, interconnected internetthingy.  What will we make of it, and what will it make of us ?

Some jokester once said "First we shape our structures .. then, our structures shape us".  Maybe an historian can help here .. was there as much (proportionally) resistance at the advent of Copernican and Galilean understandings, or at the onset of the Agrarian or Industrial Ages ? 

Will we look back in 2050 at the quaint structures and processes that (by then) we will say we inherited from the Industrial Age, or will be in the tightly-controlled grip of a proprietary corpo-governmental Panopticon ?

I’ll be 96 then.

Which reminds me of one of my favourite sayings … "One hundred years from now, all new people".

Tags: random thoughts, wirearchy, change, unchanging

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