December 16, 2003
The Irreleventsia
Glenn Reynolds writes about the fall of the Big Media dictatorship here. I call Big Media The Irreleventsia. They are increasingly irrelevant in helping to shape my world view.
For months, maybe a year, as I've been a blog lurker, and now a blogger, I have been able to piece together my world view by reading Big Media articles against a backdrop of Blog Media articles, topic by topic. Iraq war coverage, Homeland Security mission creep, RAVE act abuses, gun control, judicial activism (and the related Congressional appointment behavior), Catholic Church scandals, even the blatant lobbying by Big Media themselves at the feet of the FCC, all are subject to a tremendous amount spin, lies of omission, and yes, outright lies.
Many very smart people have seen this phenomenon and commented intelligently. I have an observation I would like add that I have not specifically seen or heard.
Attenuation no longer exists. Attenuation means, essentially, signal degradation. All of analog media, especially their marketing models, are based in signal degradation theory. If broadcast TV wanted a presence in a market, they needed to invest millions of dollars in a station whose signal may degrade to fuzz outside of a hundred mile radius. Advertisers decided whether they wanted to enter any one of several hundred local markets (only speaking domestically).
A web page has literally no signal degradation. Cnn.com, instapundit.com, and nopundit.com "tune in" with zero degradation anywhere in the world, be it a Manhattan office or a Borneo internet cafe (I'll leave it as a given that I am talking only about the technical aspects of degradation, not the political aspects, where degradation reaches 100% at a filtering device). Here is the kicker that no one gets: the size of the "amplifiers" creating all web page signals are exactly the same size. Cnn.com does not have a bigger "amp" than instapundit.com, and instapundit.com does not have a bigger "amp" than nopundit.com. Figuratively and literally, the signal strengths are all absolutely equal. You do not need specialized ham radio equipment to "pull in" nopundit.com. Cnn.com, msnbc.com, time.com, thenation.com, etc., etc., etc., not one of them can "jam" nopundit.com's signal. It is equally easy to "pull in" every last one of the millions, perhaps billions, of web pages out there. All you need is one standardized receiver, the web browser.
This, of course, is a bad thing for Big Media. Whereas anything they ever reported or editorialized in the analog world may have been fluffed and spun, there was little hope of anyone having the ability to address Big Media's audience and rebut the story or editorial. This is no longer true. Every journalist and editor who speaks up can now have his or her words scrutinized by a worldwide audience. And it is happening. Happening on a scale, blog lurker by blog lurker, blogger by blogger, that Big Media is in complete denial about. Remember the story of the servant boy who asked the king for just one grain of rice today, then only two grains of rice tomorrow, then merely four grains of rice the next day, and so on, and that would be his humble reward for a task well done. Within a month, he was the wealthiest subject of the kingdom. Combine that with the notion of six degrees of separation, and you have a lot of people talking.
I believe the dramatic drop in young male TV viewing and the drop in musical CD sales could in part be a sign of people spending their "attention" dollars in front of a blog. For me, it was and is a matter of the interesting becoming fascinating. Tom Benson, owner of the New Orleans Saints, was justified in worrying aloud whether bringing the Charlotte Hornets to New Orleans (it did happen) would endanger bothfranchises due to the scarce resources of only so many free evenings and only so much disposable income. It hasn't yet, it probably won't, but it is a legitimate question.
The interesting conclusion that I come up with is that this does not have to be a big problem for Big Media. What they have get rid of are the distortions and the agendas, and return to reporting facts. It's so simple. One of the Big Media success stories is clearly Fox News. I am not saying they get it right all the time. They still show way too much non-news, like the Michael Jackson child molestation case, the Kobe Bryant rape case, the Laci Peterson murder case, etc. I'm not saying the aforementioned stories aren't news; in my world they each deserve about 10 seconds of my viewing time. Once. What Fox News does get right is simply adopting a mien which is not self-loathing. The reporters honestly like America (it seems to me anyway), and make a sincere effort to report her successes and not just her "quagmires". Of course, liking America and being her apologist are two completely different things. I certainly do want to know about America's failures. I just don't want to be told time and again that America is a failure.
Posted by nopundit at December 16, 2003 04:20 PMI wonder how many young *women* have migrated from network television to cable offerings, as the linked article states young men have. (Young men's TV viewing overall hasn't dropped, according the article, merely their preference for network TV, what used to be called The Big Three.)
I've known for a while that student bodies at American universities have become disproportionately female, while the real value of a college degree has dropped. _Pace_ mainstream feminists, I don't believe devaluation of the degree due to sexism is the prime culprit. Sadly, I think it speaks to a disdain for freedom and a desire for social controls among too many of my own sex. I wouldn't be surprised if many young men, watching the Culture Wars on campus from afar, have decided, "Who needs that shit?"
Similarly, the conventional wisdom might be that young men prefer Comedy Central, for example, because it offers more T&A, such as "The Man Show," or raunchy humor, such as "South Park." That might be true in part, but it misses the bigger picture, that young men are drifting to entertainment options that they enjoy, not that some cultural or political elite tells them they *should* enjoy. If "South Park" were only toilet jokes with no underlying social critique — largely libertarian in nature — I doubt it would have lasted as long as it has.
I truly hope it is *not* the case that the majority of young American women would rather watch some soporific hugfest like "Oprah" or "The View" than something with freshness and bite.
Posted by: Reginleif the Valkyrie at December 22, 2003 06:27 PM