Posts Tagged ‘media’
“Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word”*…
It feels clear that we’re in the midst of a meaningful cultural/social transition… but what kind of transition? When did it begin? And what might it portend?
Increasingly, folks are turning to the works and thoughts of mid-twentieth century thinkers like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong (who drew on heavily on Havelock’s work), Marshall McLuhan, Joshua Meyrowitz, and others to suggest that we are in the midst of a shift from a literate culture (back) to an oral culture.
We’ve looked before at one (pessimistic) version this argument, and at one approach to understanding the mechanism of the shift. We return to the question today, with a fascinating conversation between Derek Thompson and Joe Weisenthal. Thomson sets the scene…
The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat TOEs as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have vast and unpredictable second-order effects.
Today’s article and interview are about my new favorite theory of everything. Let’s call it “the orality theory of everything.” This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were perhaps the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality—in which all information was spoken and all learning was social—to an age of literacy, when writing could fix words in place, allowing people to write alone, read alone, and build abstract thoughts that would have been impossible to memorize. The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought—calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics—that are the basis of all modern technology. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking, living person.
The most enthusiastic modern proponent that I know of the orality theory of everything is Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast… we discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more…
Some highlights:
Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?
Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99% of everything.
I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before really the written word or, certainly, mass literacy…
… Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn the Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. So the mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.
Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said:
Human beings in primary oral cultures do not study. They learn by apprenticeship, hunting with experienced hunters, for example, by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them, but not study in the strict sense.
I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second and third order effects. And it really is interesting to me as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned and prize a certain kind of interiority.
Wiesenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was per se communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.
The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.
So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm….
… Thompson: I want to apply your theories to some domains of modern life, starting with politics. You mentioned Donald Trump, and I went to look up Donald Trump’s nicknames, because I know that you’re very interested in his propensity for epithets, for nicknames. It’s nearly Homeric. And so fortunately for our purposes, Wikipedia keeps track of all of Donald Trump’s nicknames, so I didn’t have to remember them—speaking of outsourced memory. Here’s some of them. Steve Bannon was Sloppy Steve, Joe Biden was Sleepy Joe, Mike Bloomberg was Mini Mike, Jeb Bush, of course, Low Energy Jeb, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ James Comey, Ron DeSanctimonious, DeSantis. I think that one might’ve gotten away from him.
Weisenthal: That was late Trump, he didn’t have his fastball anymore.
Thompson: This plays into this classic tradition of orality. Right? The wine-dark seas, swift-footed Achilles. And Walter Ong has a great passage where he writes about this, that I would love to get your reaction to:
”The cliches in political denunciations in many low-technology developing cultures, enemy of the people, capitalist warmongers, that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.”
Basically, it’s so interesting to think that Ong is saying that it is low-technology developing countries where these nicknames are prevalent. But you wake up today and thee richest country in the world is presided over by a now two-time president whose facility for nicknames is very famous. I wonder what significance do you put on this? Why is it important that a figure like Trump plays into these old-fashioned oral traditions?
Wiesenthal: It’s interesting when you say things like, “Oh, Trump has a sort of Homeric quality the way he speaks,” that repels a lot of people. Like, “What are you talking about? This is nothing like Homer.” But my theory, which I can’t prove. The original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than seeing Trump as a Homeric character, what’s probably, what I’m almost certain is the case, is that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked. One of Ong’s observations in Orality and Literacy is about heavy and light characters in oral societies. Heavy characters, it’s like the Cerberus, like the three-headed dog, the Medusa, the Zeus. These just larger-than-life, frequently grotesque, visually grotesque characters.
I think if you look at the modern world, the modern world has elevated a lot of what I think Ong would call heavy characters. I certainly think Trump is a heavy character, with his makeup, and his hair, and his whole visual presentation. I think Elon is a heavy character. I think if you look at the visual way that a lot of sort of YouTube stars look with their ridiculous open-mouthed soy faces when on their YouTube screenshot. I think they sort of present themselves, not in a way that we would think of as conventionally good-looking. Right? Not in a way that’s conventionally attractive, but this sort of grotesque visual that just sticks in your head. And that that is clearly what works. We are in the time of the heavy character…
… Meyrowitz in 1985 was talking about electronic media before anyone really conceived of that idea. One of his observations is that everybody has a front stage and a backstage. We talk on this podcast in a certain way. But that is different than how we would talk at home with our family. Or you and I might talk differently when we hang up this podcast and we’re saying goodbye or something. This is a very normal thing, which is that you just talk differently in different environments and so forth.
What Meyrowitz anticipated in No Sense of Place is this idea that electronic media would cause us to come to be suspect of people who talk differently in one environment vs. another. If someone code-switched, if someone talked differently on the campaign trail than they did in their private life, that we would come to think, ”Oh, this person’s a phony.” He predicted that by allowing everyone to see all the facets of these characters, we would view them differently.
Thinking about a politician, something about Trump is that there’s very few examples of him ever talking differently than any other environment. People could be totally repelled by things that he said in public or private. But he’s not a hypocrite in the way that a lot of people use that word. He is the same in almost every environment. This is precisely what Meyrowitz would’ve anticipated, that we would gravitate toward people who when we saw their front stage and their backstage, where the concept of place was completely disintegrated from the idea of character, that we would come to view that consistency of character as a value.
Thompson: The name of Meyrowitz’s book is No Sense of Place. And I want to just slow down on that title, because it’s a pun. It’s not a very intuitive pun, but it’s a really, really smart pun. By No Sense of Place, Meyrowitz is saying that electronic media extends our consciousness outward, so we don’t really know where we are. I could be reading Twitter in Arlington, Virginia, but feel myself becoming emotional about Gaza or Ukraine, or Minneapolis, in a way that was impossible in the age before television or radio. This new age of communications media takes us out of where we are and puts us right in front of the faces of people that are thousands of miles away.
But he also means no sense of place in a hierarchical sense. He means that people will be able, with electronic media, to operate outside of their slot in the hierarchy: the poor will be able to scream at the billionaires; the disenfranchised will be able to scream at those who disenfranchise them. And this he said is going to create more social unrest. It’s going to create more, I think what he would agree now is something like populism. And this really interesting idea that electronic media not only unmoors us from where we are geographically, but that it also demolishes hierarchies, I think it was incredibly insightful, considering it was written 41 years ago.
But he goes one step further in a way that’s really surprising… He says this about our future relationship to expertise. And God only knows how many people have talked about what’s happened to expertise in the last few decades. Meyrowitz:
Our increasingly complex technological and social world has made us rely more and more heavily on expert information, but the general exposure of experts as fallible human beings has lessened our faith in them as people. The change in our image of leaders and experts leaves us with,” and this is exactly your point, “a distrust of power, but also with a seemingly powerless dependence on those in whom we have little trust…
And so much more (including their thoughts on AI): “The Obscure Media Theory That Explains ‘99% of Everything’,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social and @weisenthal.bsky.social. Or (if you’re more orally inclined) listen on Thompson’s Plain English podcast.
Via Patrick Tanguay in his always-illuminating newsletter.
* Walter J. Ong
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As we contemplate culture, we might note that it was on this date in 2012 that Encyclopædia Britannica’s president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions and that 2010’s 15th edition would be the last. The first (printed) edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled upon a New Plan.” Since 2012, the company has focused only on an online edition and other educational tools. It goes by simply “Britannica” now.
“The new media are not ways of relating to us the ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will.”*…
There is a vortex of forces shaping the future of journalism. Censorship, both direct and indirect, is on the rise in the U.S. and around the world. Concentration of media ownership is homogenizing coverage and creating “news deserts.”
At the same time, new technology and new applications of that technology are reshaping the Fourth estate. The Reuters Institute at Oxford surveyed 280 digital leaders from 51 countries and territories to learn what they are seeing– and planning. From the Executive Summary…
We are still at the early stages of another big shift in technology (Generative AI) which threatens to upend the news industry by offering more efficient ways of accessing and distilling information at scale. At the same time, creators and influencers (humans) are driving a shift towards personality-led news, at the expense of media institutions that can often feel less relevant, less interesting, and less authentic. In 2026 the news media are likely to be further squeezed by these two powerful forces.
Understanding the impact of these trends, and working out how to combat them, will be high up the ‘to do list’ of media executives this year, despite the unevenly distributed pace of change across countries and demographics.
Existential challenges abound. Declining engagement for traditional media combined with low trust is leading many politicians, businessmen, and celebrities to conclude that they can bypass the media entirely, giving interviews instead to sympathetic podcasters or YouTubers. This Trump 2.0 playbook – now widely copied around the world – often comes bundled with a barrage of intimidating legal threats against publishers and continuing attempts to undermine trust by branding independent media and individual journalists as ‘fake news’. These narratives are finding fertile ground with audiences – especially younger ones – that prefer the convenience of accessing news from platforms, and have weaker connections with traditional news brands. Meanwhile search engines are turning into AI-driven answer engines, where content is surfaced in chat windows, raising fears that referral traffic for publishers could dry up, undermining existing and future business models.
Despite these difficulties many traditional news organisations remain optimistic about their own business – if not about journalism itself. Publishers will be focused this year on re-engineering their businesses for the age of AI, with more distinctive content and a more human face. They will also be looking beyond the article, investing more in multiple formats especially video and adjusting their content to make it more ‘liquid’ and therefore easier to reformat and personalise. At the same time, they’ll be continuing to work out how best to use Generative AI themselves across newsgathering, packaging, and distribution. It’s a delicate balancing act but one that – if they can pull it off – holds out the promise of greater efficiency and more relevant and engaging journalism.
These are the main findings from our industry survey:
- Only slightly more than a third (38%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead – that’s 22pp lower than four years ago. Stated concerns relate to politically motivated attacks on journalism, loss of USAID money that previously supported independent media in many parts of the world, and significant declines in traffic to many online news sites.
- By contrast, around half (53%) say they are confident about their own business prospects, similar to last year’s figure. Upmarket subscription-based publishers with strong direct traffic can see a path to long-term profitability, even as those that remain dependent on advertising and print worry about sharp declines in revenue and the potential impact of AI powered search on the bottom line.
- Publishers expect traffic from search engines to decline by more than 40% over the next three years – not quite ‘Google Zero’ but a substantial impact none the less. Data sourced for this report from analytics provider Chartbeat shows that aggregate traffic to hundreds of news sites from Google search has already started to dip, with publishers that rely on lifestyle content saying they have been particularly affected by the roll out of Google’s AI overviews. This comes after substantial falls in referral traffic to news sites from Facebook (-43%) and X, formerly Twitter (-46%) over the last three years.
- In response, publishers say it will be important to focus on more original investigations and on the ground reporting (+91 percentage point difference between ‘more’ and ‘less’), contextual analysis and explanation (+82) and human stories (+72). By contrast, they plan to scale back service journalism (-42), evergreen content (-32), and general news (-38), which many expect to become commoditised by AI chatbots. At the same time, they think it will be important to invest in more video (+79) – including ‘watch tabs’ – more audio formats (+71) such as podcasts but a bit less in text output.
- In terms of off-platform strategies, YouTube will be the main focus for publishers this year with a net score of +74, up substantially on last year. Other video-led platforms such as TikTok (+56) and Instagram (+41) are also key priorities – along with working out how to navigate distribution through AI platforms (+61) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. Google Discover remains a critical (+19), if slightly volatile, source of referral traffic, while some publishers are looking to find new audiences via newsletter platforms such as Substack (+8). By contrast, publishers will be deprioritising effort spent on old-style Google SEO (-25) – as well as traditional social networks Facebook (-23) and X (-52)
- Last year we predicted the emergence of ‘agentic AI’, but this year we can expect to start to see real-world impact of these more advanced technologies. Some sources suggest that there will soon be more bots than people reading publisher websites, as tools like Huxe and OpenAI’s Pulse offer personalised news briefings at scale. Three-quarters of our respondents (75%) expect ‘agentic tools’ to have a ‘large’ or ‘very large’ impact on the news industry in the near future.
- Alongside the traffic disruption from AI, news executives also see opportunities to build new revenue from licensing content (or a share of advertising revenue) within chatbots. Around a fifth (20%) of publisher respondents – mainly from upmarket news companies – expect future revenues to be substantial, with half (49%) saying that they expect a minor contribution. A further fifth (20%), mostly made up of local publishers, public broadcasters, or those from smaller countries, say they do not expect any income from AI deals.
- More widely, subscription and membership remain the biggest revenue focus (76%) for publishers, ahead of both display (68%) and native advertising (64%). Online and physical events (54%) are also becoming more important as part of a diversified revenue strategy. Reliance on philanthropic and foundation support (18%) has declined this year, after cuts of media support budgets in the United States and elsewhere.
- Meanwhile news organisations’ use of AI technologies continues to increase across all categories, with back-end automation considered ‘important’ this year by the vast majority (97%) of publisher respondents, many of whom integrated pilot systems into content management systems in the last year. Newsgathering cases (82%) are now the second most important, with faster coding and product development (81%) also gaining traction.
- Over four in ten (44%) survey respondents say that their newsroom AI initiatives are showing ‘promising’ results, but a similar proportion (42%) describe them as ‘limited’. Two-thirds of respondents (67%) say they have not saved any jobs so far as a result of AI efficiencies. Around one in seven (16%) say they have slightly reduced staff numbers but a further one in ten (9%) have added new roles/cost.
- The rise of news creators and influencers is a concern for publishers in two ways. More than two-thirds (70%) of our respondents are concerned that they are taking time and attention away from publisher content. Four in ten (39%) worry that they are at risk of losing top editorial talent to the creator ecosystem, which offers more control and potentially higher financial rewards.
- Responding to the increased competition and a shift of trust towards personalities, three-quarters (76%) of publisher respondents say they will be trying to get their staff to behave more like creators this year. Half (50%) said they would be partnering with creators to help distribute content, around a third (31%) said they would be hiring creators, for example to run their social media accounts. A further 28% are looking to set up creator studios and facilitate joint ventures.
More widely, could 2026 be the year when AI company stock valuations come down to earth with a bump, amid concerns about whether their trillion-dollar bets will pay back their investors? Meanwhile the amount of low-quality AI automated content, including so-called ‘pink slime’ sites, looks set to explode, with platforms struggling to distinguish this from legitimate news.
We can expect more public concern about the role of big tech in our lives. This may include individual acts of ‘Appstinence’ and other forms of digital detox and a desire for more IRL (In Real Life) connection. Governments will also come under pressure to do more to protect young and other vulnerable groups online, even in the United States.
The creator economy will continue to surge, fuelled by investments from video platforms and streamers. At the top end creators will look more like Hollywood moguls with big budgets and their own studio complexes. Within news, we’ll also see the emergence of bigger, more robust, creator-led companies delivering significant revenues as well as value to audiences – offering ever greater competition for traditional journalism…
Read the report in full: “Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026,” from @reutersinstitute.bsky.social.
* Marshall McLuhan
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As we ponder the prospects of the press, we might type a birthday note to John Baskerville, a pioneering English printer and typefounder, who was born on this date in 1706. Among Baskerville’s publications in the British Museum’s collection are Aesop’s Fables (1761), the Bible (1763), and the works of Horace (1770)– many printed on a stock he invented, “wove paper”, which was considerably smoother than “laid paper”, allowing for sharper printing results. And as for his fonts, Baskerville’s creations (including the famous “Baskerville,” a predecessor to the very similar Times New Roman) were so successful that his competitors resorted to claims that they damaged the eyes.
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”*…
In the early 1970’s Marshall McLuhan and his son set out to discover if there might be general principles of technology, attributes, and effects common to all products of human innovation, to all of these artificial extensions of ourselves. Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan shares their findings…
… Toward the end of his life, a life which ended before his 70th birthday, Avant Garde magazine asked Marshall McLuhan what he considered his greatest achievement. His reply?
“I consider my greatest achievement is the discovery that all human artifacts, all the extensions of man, are patterned structurally in the mode of the word. Whether it is a medium like radio, a bull dozer, or a safety pin; whether it is the word or a law of science, all these utterings and outerings of man have a four-part structure which is that of metaphor itself. I will illustrate this discovery from the character of money, which:
(a) enhances the speed of exchange
(b) obsolesces barter
(c) retrieves potlatch (conspicuous waste) and
(d) when pushed to its limits, flips or reverses its character into credit.
A book of these things is due to appear, title ‘The Laws of the Media’.”
But no one was interested in publishing it. It wasn’t published until 1988 when Eric McLuhan finally got someone – University of Toronto Press – to put it out as ‘Laws of Media: The New Science.’ The subtitle was a deliberate nod to Francis Bacon (Novum Organon) and Giambattista Vico (Scienza Nuova) of which tradition the McLuhans felt their work was part.
I have noticed more people using the laws of media, or the ‘tetrad’ (group of four) as it’s called, lately.
The laws of media can’t tell you everything about any technology, but they give you four reliable places from which to begin to explore what any technology is and what it does – another way of saying ‘the medium is the message.’ Particularly, it’s a way of examining the form of a thing and not just its content. The content of a medium, what we do with it, pay attention to, is always both the smaller part of the situation, and the less affective area. In Understanding Media McLuhan brilliantly paraphrases T S Eliot when he describes content as the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The content keeps us busy, hold our attention, while the media do their work rearranging us, our lives, our world. To enlist Mary Poppins, content is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The four things the McLuhans discovered are that:
Any given technology enhances or amplifies some aspect of us. We create tools to do something we already do faster, more easily or efficiently. Gloves to save our hands. Computers, to calculate. Telephone, that our voice carries across the world.
“It is a persistent theme of this book that all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” (‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ 1964)
It obsolesces, it upsets or displaces, disrupts something already in a dominant position. The Linotype machine put 90% of typesetters out of work. Twitter broke the news that television and radio networks used to.
“Now today, we speak of the book as obsolete. This means the book is acquiring ever new uses in the age of Xerox and the age of paperbacks.” (Marshall and Eric McLuhan in conversation, 1971)
It retrieves, or brings back something from the past, however near or far, in a new form. Text messaging put a telegraph in your pocket. The man in the car, the knight in shining armour.
“What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?” ‘Laws of Media: The New Science’ 1988
When pushed past a point, it tends to flip or reverses its utility or characteristics. A glass of wine or two can make for a good time, relieve stress, grease the social wheels. A few bottles… quite the opposite. Information assists informed, timely decisions, too much information leads to overload, paralysis.
“When pushed to the limits of its potential the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?” (Laws of Media: The New Science 1988)
For example, here’s a tetrad from Laws of Media:
Xerox:
enhances: the speed of the printing press
obsolesces: the assembly-line book
reverses into: everybody becomes a publisher
retrieves: the oral tradition
Laws of Media: The New Science (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, 1988)
While media can be complex in nature and do many things, Marshall and Eric found that all media, without exception, do these four things. As remarkable as this discovery is – so remarkable that Marshall McLuhan considered it his most impressive achievement – almost equally remarkable is that so few people know about it.
They found four things which applied in all cases, but never stopped looking for a fifth. I know my father Eric was still keeping an eye or ear out for a fifth common dimension, something that would apply without exception to all media. A few people have ventured one thing or another but they did not satisfy my father’s criteria…
… The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can come up with will do these four things. It will amplify some part of us. It will make something obsolete. It will bring something back from the past in a new form. It will, when pushed, flip. This is an incredible advantage when it comes to new media. It gives us a real head start on being able to anticipate the effects of new forms on us and our world…
… [Per the title quote above] The point of the tetrad, the point of media studies at all, is to make media visible. To force us to pay attention to what’s happening all around us, sometimes only slightly beneath our awareness, sometimes buried deeply underneath. The true user experience is what we don’t notice but which shapes us all the same…
More (including how to “make” tetrads yourself): “Laws of (New) Media.”
* Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964
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As we engage with the emergent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that ABC and CBS simultaneously broadcast their own movies based on the Amy Fisher story with ABC’s starring Drew Barrymore and CBS’s starring Alyssa Milano. NBC had already scooped the other networks, airing their own version (starring Noelle Parker) about six days prior.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”*…
… But that most valuable of gifts is being hijacked, subverted/converted into a commodity, and used to mold not just consumer behavior, but society-as-a-whole. We live in an attention economy, and its media/tech ownership landscape is becoming ever more consoldiated.
Kyla Scanlon unpacks the way in which concentrated ownership of media and tech and their automated manipulation reshape democracy…
It’s nearly impossible not to get lost in the news right now. I was at a wedding last week, and every conversation eventually drifted back to the same subject: the World We Are in and All That is Happening. The ground feels like it’s moving faster than anyone can feasibly keep up with.
Some people think the shift is progress. Others see collapse. Either way, the line between digital and physical life is increasingly blurry. What happens online is real life. What we consume is what we become.
Plenty of thinkers have circled this before – Postman, Debord, Huxley, Orwell on media; Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Thucydides, Gibbon on human corruptibility during times of uncertainty. The convergence of endless information and a ragebait economy creates the perfect environment for splintering how we understand the world and how we understand each other.
The deeper problem is this: we no longer trust institutions to provide truth, fairness, or mobility. Once, they were scaffolding that helped us climb from raw data to wisdom. And when that scaffolding gives out, people adapt: some over-perform in the status race (because you have to) and others defect from obligations altogether (why would I work for institutions if they don’t work for me).
There are a few ways to picture our distorted information ecosystem.
- The DIKW Pyramid (Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom): raw posts and clicks at the bottom, trending content in the middle, shared truths above that, and finally wisdom, the rare ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
- Or the Ladder of Inference: we start with data, add meaning, make assumptions – and our beliefs tend to affect what data we select. Bots and algorithms hijack that ladder, nudging us toward polarized beliefs before we realize what’s happening.
Taken together, we can combine them into what we might call a hierarchy of information:
- Raw data: the endless stream of posts, likes, bot spam
- Information: headlines, hashtags, trending things
- Knowledge: the narratives we share and fight over.
- Understanding: recognizing what might not be real (or is hyperreal)
- Wisdom: systemic analysis, the ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
Right now, we’re stuck sloshing around in the middle layers of the hierarchy: drowning in outrage, fighting over partisan hot takes, rarely reaching understanding, almost never wisdom.
Chaos always has an architect. And if we want to make sense of American democracy today, we need to understand who those architects are, and how they profit from confusion.
This polarization rests on media concentration.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was sold as a way to increase competition in media and telecommunications, but in reality, it did quite the opposite. Within five years, four firms controlled ~85% of US telephone infrastructure. That deregulated spine carried today’s consolidation of the entire media environment – not just telephones. Newspapers. Social media. TV stations.
We have the increasing concentration of media ownership, the financialization of attention, and the transformation of information from a public good into a private commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated…
[Scanlon characterizes and explains the concentration, examines its impacts, and unpacks the roles of bots…]
When manufacturing consensus is both cheap to produce and valuable to those who benefit from confusion, you get industrial-scale manipulation.
Truth becomes whatever can capture the most attention in the shortest amount of time. Traditional journalism, with its slow fact-checking and institutional processes, can’t compete with bot-amplified outrage. Democratic deliberation, which requires shared facts and good faith dialogue, becomes nearly impossible when the information environment is designed to maximize conflict.
We’re living in a speculation economy where perception drives value more than fundamentals. Look at the stock market: Nvidia gained $150 billion in value based the back of a $100 billion OpenAI investment (which OpenAI will use to buy more Nvidia chips). Ten companies pass hundreds of billions back and forth, and the S&P jumps like it’s measuring something real.
It’s all memes wearing suits. Meme stocks and Dogecoin at least looked like jokes; now the same speculative energy runs through the corporate core. Attention, perception, and narrative drive valuation more than production or profit.
We’ve built a world where the hierarchy of information has flipped upside down.
At the bottom, bots flood us with raw noise. In the middle, outrage and team narratives harden into “knowledge.” At the top, the ladders to wisdom like journalism, schools, civic discourse, shared institutions are weakened. The scaffolding that once helped us climb no longer holds.
The traditional solutions – fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation – assume we’re dealing with a content problem when we’re actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable.
Recognizing this as a market structure problem rather than an information problem changes everything. Instead of focusing on individual bad actors or specific false claims, you start thinking about the underlying systems that make manipulation both profitable and scalable.
The information wars are economic policy, determining how we allocate attention, structure incentives, and organize the flow of information that shapes every other market and political decision we make. I don’t think it’s useful to get on a Substack soapbox about this – but we need to take (1) the power of media seriously and (2) those trying to influence it extremely seriously. There is a way to get to the top of the information hierarchy! We don’t have to be stuck in these middle layers…
Follow the money: “Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention?” from @kyla.bsky.social
For more on how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped set all of this in motion, see: “On Jimmy Kimmel: It’s Time to Destroy the Censorship Machine and Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996” from @matthewstoller.bsky.social.
For more on thoughts on why companies are behaving in the ways they are: “Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump” and “Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next.”
And lest we think that this came out of nowhere: “David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About these Eight Things.”
[Image above: source]
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As we reclaim recognition, we might recall that on this date in 1452 an earlier information revolution began: Johannes Gutenberg started work on his Bible (which was completed and published in 1455). An inventor and craftsman, Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press, enabling a much faster (and cheaper) printing process. (Movable type was already in use in East Asia, but was slower and used for smaller jobs.) His Bible was his first major work, and his most impactful.
The printing press later spread across the world, leading to an information revolution– the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Humanist movements.
“The sole aim of journalism should be service”*…
Journalism in the U.S. is in turmoil, beset by cultural shifts, technology, economics, and politics. Today, two thoughful pieces on what its future could hold.
First, from Richard Gingras, a long (and fascinating and provocative) piece that diagnoses the situation, traces its evolution, and posits (at least approaches to) solutions. Eminently worth reading in full. Here, an excerpt especially resonant for your correspondent…
… I recently revisited the work of Robert Putnam. Putnam has researched the connection between effective governance and community engagement for five decades. He began his work in Italy, which in 1975 shifted power from the central government to the provinces. He found that the strongest corollary with effective governance was community engagement.
Basically, people in regions of ineffective governance were not joining clubs, they weren’t going on picnics or joining bowling leagues. They weren’t getting to know people who were different from them. They weren’t building a shared reality. They weren’t building social capital.
This is the result of many factors: the rise of television, increased suburbanization, the impact of technology and the Internet. The result is increased isolation, a narrowing of empathy, a reduction in common interest. Without community and real world social engagement we are not exposed to the diversity of our communities. We lose the opportunity to understand the challenges and the attributes of people who are not like us. If we don’t engage with the other, with those who are not like us, we become more vulnerable to perceiving the other from an isolated, removed, silo of fear.
Our greatest opportunity may be at the community level, by rethinking the role of a community news organization as a community platform suited to our modern digital world.
First, its explicit mission would be to strengthen the community, to both address the community’s information needs and create opportunities for engagement. In seeking to bring the diversity of a community together, it would also strive to be assiduously apolitical. Again, we inform, you decide.
Second, it would celebrate the community’s hopes and dreams, giving focus to its successes, to examples of civic empathy, as well as being the watchdog for misbehavior.
It would purposely address the community’s broad information needs — community events, local sports, the progression of life from birth to obituary. It would leverage topics of community interest that aren’t controversial. A recent mega-study coordinated by Stanford University determined the best method of addressing divisiveness is to engage the community on non-controversial subjects. This can help unify a community and build the trust necessary to address more difficult topics.
We see accountability journalism as the priority, to ferret out corruption, to expose criminal behavior. It is critical. But the audience for serious accountability journalism is small, in the low single digits. By addressing a community’s comprehensive information needs with service journalism, we can provide value to the community and gain exponentially higher engagement. This both drives the business model and increases the impact of accountability journalism by exposing it to those who might not seek it out…
– “The evolution of media and democracy. How we got here. How we might move forward.“
Next, a piece from Patrice Schneider, the Chief Strategy Officer of Media Development Investment Fund, suggesting a funding approach that might make (more quality) journalism (more) viable. While his lens is global, the applicability to the U.S. is clear…
In the dynamic landscape of independent media funding, a three-decade-old model is gaining renewed attention among European foundations. It challenges the traditional dichotomy between grant support and market-driven investments. This innovative approach, known as the Third Way, offers a nuanced economic strategy that quantifies the intrinsic societal value of quality public interest information.
The Third Way recognizes quality information as critical infrastructure, akin to highways or electrical grids. Its value extends beyond immediate monetary returns, encompassing its capacity to sustain democratic dialogue, enable informed citizenship, and provide systemic transparency…
… The Third Way’s most profound insight is recognising the broad constituency invested in quality information:
- Corporations require reliable, unbiased data for strategic decision-making.
- Financial institutions depend on transparent market intelligence.
- Civil society organizations need independent reporting to monitor power structures
- Individual citizens seek credible narratives to navigate complex global challenges
- Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) fundamentally rely on access to accurate, independent information
By aligning these diverse interests, the model transcends traditional funding dichotomies; grants versus investments or market versus public funding.
And it’s not just about extracting more from philanthropy, but about creating a blended infrastructure of funding that recognises information as a shared societal resource...
– “The Third Way of Funding Independent Media” (again, eminently worth reading in full)
(Full disclosure, both Richard and Patrice are colleagues. MDIF– originally Media Development Loan Fund– was founded by an old friend, Saša Vučinić, and your correspondent was an early investor.)
* Mahatma Gandhi
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As we nourish the news, we might spare a thought for Alistair Cooke; he died on this date in 2004. While best known ot American audiences as a television host (Omnibus, Masterpiece Theatre), he had a long career as a journalist (for the BBC, NBC, The Gaurdian, and others) and author.
After Alistair Cooke’s death the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism was established as a tribute to his life and career achievements. The award supports students from the United Kingdom to undertake studies in the United States, and for Americans to study in the United Kingdom.
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