Chicken or Egg?

Take what media you like, newspaper, magazine, TV or, we should now add in, YouTube and they all make the same defensive claim, they only serve what their consumers want. If the consumer did not repeat view their product they would not be in business. They simply just reflect the public taste at large as exercised by their consumers. Cant argue with that.

The consumer of course can only choose from the range of diets presented as an all-in package and has to accept all the sleaze and distasteful alongside with those items that more closely aligned with their own taste. If only life was black and white, then consumer choice alone would be able to shift the media diet to the wider more desirable topics. But it is not black and white. The various forms of media are all mega industries with huge investments to recoup so have invested heavily into the triggers of impulse interest that push their format to the fore. They have to connect with the buying public to stay alive and are certainly more savvy than the consumer as to what ticks theirs boxes. It is not a level playing field in many regards.

We the consumer have our vulnerabilities. We do seem attracted to the saucy, the salacious, the risqué, the hint of scandal, the banana slip as well as the more worthy heroics, compassionate or daring-do. These almost subconscious predilections are exploited to the full. Backed up no doubt with serial focus groups to dissect and redefine the expected targeted response to each new item so to better sharpen the attack the next time round. So collective weaknesses are examined and exploited but we collectively do not think or wonder about those same weaknesses so exploited. So what if the bumps and grinds, the show and tells of every day life have a disproportionate exposure and collective awareness than they really deserve?

Gone are the mutual musings and levelling of the village pub or extended family gatherings. It is the soap storyline and morality, the simplified banner headline, the isolated gratuitous image clip that now forms and shapes our collective id, that consensual value of what is our idea of the norm or acceptable. The media is the main if not the only tool shaping how we see life, our expectations of what might happen and our setting the bar for our hopes for future achievement. Insidiously, life choices are preselected, simplified and promoted with the range of content within the media outlet consumed. Not a one off single shot but a grapeshot broadside scattered wide, diffused from the advert content, editorial direction all the way through to the sappy snappy prime attention grabber focus.

The winning morality and life style thus promoted is simplistic, confrontational divisive, you are either with us or against simplicity. Anything else leads to dialogue, doubt and debate and these self-evidently are not attention grabbers. To promote themselves the media simplify real life down to easily digestible sound bites with quick easy direct emotional or sentimental appeal. There simply is no scope for complexities or alternate possibilities that real life is seeped in. Thus the media have taken over and now control the direction of social development. There is no alternative dialogue, they hold the keys to all the channels of expression.

These keys that determine our societies future direction are held by one man with regard to newspapers, or just a few individuals on governing boards with regard to TV, films or magazines. Each is referential, looking to the other for signs of a new approach or direction to copy that might quicken interest. It is not just that all of our morality and political agendas are being set by just a small group of not necessarily representative individuals, as if that was in itself acceptable. But they are setting the very tenure of our society. Our very democratic political systems has coalesced so as to be better presented and advantaged by the way the media chooses to present it. What? Adversarial sells better than complimentary but nuances of differences. The more extreme they can position the parties the easier they are to differentiate and label as good or evil. This in the long term serves our political system badly. The coalition is uncomfortable in the hands of the media so they look and promote dissent. Equally they could promote successful collaboration but that would not sell copy.

Every government announcement has to be in terms of right or wrong there is no middle ground of maybes and it depends. Ministers are either liars or the good guys without a flaw. A decision is right or else it is a gigantic cockup. Watch out if a Prime Minster was to say, "I have not yet decided which way to go"! But this not the reality of the political processes, it is full of uncertainty, full of balancing conflicting interest, full of lack of precise information and clear judgements. That is why we have politics, personal moral judgement at its finest. Except of course the media cannot sell complexity so we have adversarial politics. Contrary to the real issues, whenever a major policy comes to public notice it has to be couched in for or against terms. In the past when you may have had twenty conflicting opinions written up in the same newspaper even, you the reader were exposed to a width and range of views and you could sense out the issues that seemed right to you. Not now. With just a few hands controlling the output direction there is now just one focused opinion represented in a range of ways. No choice.

What we need desperately as a society is information about the facts, the conflicts and the choices and then wide ranging debate. Only then we as a society will grow up and begin to come to terms with all the complexities our modern society challenges us with. Chicken or egg. Ultimately we each choose which media we take up. We all need to make more careful choices and to be more articulate about what we do not like. We can actually change the shape and nature of our society. If we choose. It is up to us. Each and everyone of us.