Tuesday, August 31, 2010
MEDIA, OLD AND NEW
I got an angry email this morning from the most leftward of the Ancient Mariners on my email list of Old maritime lawyers. He was railing against the phenomenon he encountered of other older friends of his forwarding silly emails to him that contained political "quotes" that were easily demonstrated to be fakes with a simple check of Snopes. I replied:
* * * * * *As an extraterrestrial anthropologist (I'm almost finished with my final report -- I promise! -- I just need to polish off the "Recommendations" sections at the end), I find this phenomenon fascinating. One of our number (ahem ...) was notorious for forwarding this kind of thing around the office. Interestingly, the frequency of his sending of these kinds of emails has decreased substantially as he has repeatedly encountered "snopes-ing" from younger folks.
Naturally, I have a theory about this. Here it is: This phenomenon correlates closely (but not entirely) with age. It's much more common with people whose cultural sensitivities predate a certain point in the evolution and proliferation of electronic media. I believe it is possible that these older folks, whose perceptions of how information is disseminated in the wider world was formed in the age of much more concentrated, pre-electronic mass media, have not fully internalized the qualitative difference between media in those ancient days and how it functions now.
Before some time in the 1980s, distributing information widely was HARD and EXPENSIVE. Now it's EASY and CHEAP. In the days of newspapers and broadcast radio and television, there were multiple layers of filters between the origin of some text or image and the final stage of receipt of that image by a large number of people. This tended to weed out the most obvious fakes and frauds. Now, any idiot can type, photoshop, cut, paste and post ANYTHING for EVERYONE for essentially NO COST.
For those whose world view was formed in the age of Hearst and Murrow, if you saw something in print, heard a voice on the radio or saw an image on a TV screen, it had a HUGE implication of legitimacy. It takes a while to fully internalize that this phenomenon has not only completely disappeared, but that we're moving rapidly in the opposite direction. This has given rise to Burch Aphorism #327: "The Internet is the most effective amplifier of stupidity ever devised by man."
Now, there is a corollary of this set of phenomena that is often visible on the opposite side of the political spectrum from the one upon which you comment, Philip. This is the residual tendency to perceive the traditional mainstream media as a paragon of reliability. Recall that one of the essential elements of Old Media was the necessary inclusion of multiple layers of filtering that went into the process of its functioning. These filters certainly did act as checks on information quality. But they also imposed biases on information. The relative trickle of information that made it to the final stage of printing and broadcasting in Old Media (compared to the firehose of data -- good and bad -- spewed by the Interwebs thingie) had been massaged and spun and skewed before it was offered up to media consumers. The product delivered by the beloved, avuncular, honey-toned voice of a Cronkite was very much a highly processed product.
I have perceived a tendency among some people (again, typically those whose word view was formed in the age of Old Media) to be unaware of or at least highly discount the processed nature of the product offered by the struggling dinosaurs of the Old Media. Since, prior to the coming of the Murdoch, Old Media in America was primarily an organ of the middle-brow Left, this tendency to be unaware of the filtering in Old Media products tends to be more common among older folks with Red, or at least Pink, political and cultural values.
Thus, for instance, when Cronkite's anointed successor, Dan Rather, based a "60 Minutes" "story" on documents about Shrub's National Guard service that were easily-demonstrable, crude forgeries, many older folks on the left simply couldn't accept it. Rather said it, CBS wouldn't make such a stupid mistake, it must be true; thus went the straight-forward syllogism for these people. Ironically, the simple method of demonstrating the forgeries arose from the very computer technology that was swiftly undermining the business model of the Old Media strangle-hold on our culture.
Likewise, the gross leftist bias of the New York Times is simply invisible to a substantial (but rapidly shrinking) segment of the population. The fact that there is a pipeline of cultural indoctrination that leads from undergraduate journalism school straight to the newsroom, and that is enforced with a social filter at the hiring and promotion stage within the newsrooms of the non-Murdoch Old Media is to these antiquated news consumer like water to a fish -- so all-pervasive that they are unaware of it. They only become aware of this phenomenon when the nature of the "water" changes -- thus they can see the filters at work at Fox, but don't see it at the NYT, CNN and MSNBC.
I hope this helps. This subject will be treated at greater length in my final report.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:26 AM
