The Fall of Mass Media and the Rise of Person-to-Person Web Fields
Like many Medium readers, I avoid mass media these days. The defining moment for me was the embarrassing media meltdown during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, but the signs of media decay were noticeable for many years. To understand the decline of mass media we have to realize that “mass” media is, first of all, a “broadcast” media, as it works by sending the same professionally produced message simultaneously to millions of human recipients. It is further reinforced by the massive temporal repetition of this carefully crafted message across all media channels and, in a reflection of the monopoly ownership of the industry, this broadcast is coordinated by a single central regulator. Jeff Bezos may have bought The Washington Post, but he takes orders from the real media owners, just like the rest of the “free and independent” US journalists at NYT, Atlantic or other media outlets which often reprint AP and Reuters dispatches, down to accurately reproduced grammatical errors. Video journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX are no different, and the same is true of major Hollywood studios. When an independent movie, like Luke Besson’s Valerian, comes along, it will not get fair treatment from the establishment film critics, nor will it get space at theater screens controlled by the studio monopolies.
The mass media and particularly the press would like us to believe that they are “shining light into the dark corners of the world,” “making powerful accountable” and “giving voice to the voiceless” to use just some of their creative quotes. History tells us otherwise: The 20th-century and 21st-century mass media have a long and illustrious history of lying to the American people. Pulitzer and Hearst’s newspapers lied about the sinking of USS Maine to start the Spanish-American war in 1898, and they lied about the “sinking” of HMS Sussex to justify the US entrance into WWI. The mass media lied about Bay of Tonkin incident to justify starting Vietnam war, they lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq war, and they lied about Maidan Square incident to justify the Ukrainian war. Present media hysteria about an alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections and the unsubstantiated claims of Assad’s role in a recent chemical attack in Syria raise worries about the possibility of new wars.
Most Americans live and breathe mass media every day, and even if they know that they are being manipulated, they are still susceptible to mass media manipulation. How is this possible? The answer was provided a long time ago by the father of modern US media propaganda, Edward Bernays. In his 1925 book, aptly named Propaganda he states that “It will be objected that propaganda will tend to defeat itself as its mechanism becomes obvious to the public. My opinion is that it will not” and continues: “There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities. The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses.” It turns out that the invention of Internet in 1990’s changed the price of mind manipulating technology quite a bit and as we shall see, there are significant negative consequences for the mass media when anyone with an iPhone and Periscope can instantly broadcast across the world wide web.
Kurt Lewin, a seminal German psychologist and a former director of British Tavistock Institute advanced the art of mind manipulation far beyond Bernays contribution. Combining dynamic approach with a field theory, he stated in his 1945 paper: Conduct, Knowledge, and Acceptance of New Values that “#1 The processes governing the acquisition of the normal and abnormal are fundamentally alike” and #2. The re-educative process has to fulfill a task which is essentially equivalent to a change in culture”. He concludes his paper by emphasizing the role of charismatic leader in the re-education process: “#10. The individual accepts the new system of values and belief by accepting belongingness to a group. The teacher and the student have to feel as members of the same group in the matter involving their sense of values.” Kurt Lewin’s work on group dynamics was embraced during, and after WWII by the US government as in a few short years he established the Harvard psychology clinic, the National Training Laboratories and also through his work at Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Duke and other universities.
Finally, forty years after Bernays, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the architect of several US administrations including the Obama’s administration, wrote in his 1971 book Between Two Ages: “[Today] in the Technotronic society, individual citizens are easily within reach of magnetic and attractive personalities through the massive increase of newspapers and latest communication technology [which can] manipulate emotions and control reason. In the future, we shall have the means to manipulate the behavior and intellectual functioning of all people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain”. A good example of magnetic personality would be actor Matt Damon who persuaded thousands to sign up for a one way trip to Mars by playing an astronaut in the blockbuster movie Martian and “sciencing the hell out of it” by growing potatoes on Mars.
Sure, I am upset about the not so hidden agenda of the US mass media and their increasingly more aggressive efforts to manipulate the US public opinion. But, in the end, it is not the critiques like this one which will change their behavior. Just like the old Soviet Union, the US mass media will be crushed not by arguments but by economics and technology. There is plenty of evidence that mass media are losing their influence. Declining readership at New York Times, Washington Post, declining viewership of CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, and the declining movie revenues are quite measurable, and eventually, they will result in the disappearance of many venerable media institution. But let’s not just take my word for it, listen to media own analysis:
NY Posts article headlined Big TV networks won’t sell as many commercials this year, concludes that “2017 is looking bleak for TV commercials” and projects ad sales in TV broadcast to decline by 6%. The related news was a sharp drop in entertainment stocks on May 3rd when Viacom was down 7.3%, CBS was down 3.4%, and even the venerable Disney was down 2.4%. Multiple reports by the LA Times and the Hollywood Reporter indicate that 2017 box office revenue is on track to decline 5% to 10% from a year ago. 2016 “big four” TV networks ratings were down in double digits for the fall season. Finally, in May 2016, Guardian reported under the headline: “Mass media is over, but where does journalism go from here?” that “we are coming to the end of the Gutenberg age, “ and its author Roy Greenslade concludes gloomily: “I see journalism vanishing before my eyes.”
This article may not bring Roy much comfort. I do not subscribe to a newspaper for at least 20 years, and the only reason I have TV subscription is that Comcast will not sell me internet service without it. That too will change. I love movies, but these days I mostly watch them in a 4K streaming format on the web. I stopped going to movie theaters about a year ago when I realized that most new Hollywood productions are little more than the establishment propaganda, increasingly more obvious and increasingly more desperate. While production values of Hollywood movies are higher than ever before, moral values are obliterated, replaced by the indoctrination to hate anyone disagreeing with the establishment.
So where do I get my news instead? From the web of course. My browser has shortcuts with over 30 news sites offering many different points of views from all over the world. I often try to find at least two or three differing points of view to get a better understanding of a particular story. The composition of my news shortcuts changes all the time, when Guardian broke Edward Snowden’s story, it was on top of my list, later I switched to Der Spiegel which covered brilliantly Russian/Ukrainian conflict. Today both publication lost their priority position on my list as they succumbed to the siren song of globalism and made 180 degrees U-turn. The same happened to Al Jazeera after it started its US web site. A few years ago I found that Russian RT had excellent stories covering some US events and South China Morning Star had deep coverage of Chinese events as well as Hong Kong student uprising. Alas RT and Morning Star got co-opted too and today are both propaganda organs for their respective governments. I also used to follow FOX News website until they fired their top moderators recently. Today Fox News is no different from the leftist online publications like New York Times or CNN, they neatly fill their assigned role of “soft” critique in the mainstream propaganda, pretending to be a conservative publication. They are not a conservative publication, just like CNN is not a liberal publication, they both print what they are told.
To put it bluntly, we have witnessed that just like print publications, web news sites too can get co-opted by the establishment once they reach a certain threshold of success. I discovered that Google news lost its independence streak a few weeks after they helped to elect Obama in 2012 presidential elections and dropped their “Do no Evil” mission manifesto. Twitter did likewise, although its cooperation with the establishment and censorship of conservative points of view did not help to lift their stock price. As I write these lines, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other are all deploying “fake news” filter with the help of left leaning political operatives, and Soros funded NGO’s. The upshot of all of this is that it seems that no corporate entity is beyond the reach of the global establishment. Even Drudge Report, still blocked by Twitter, seems funky to me these days.
But there is hope on the horizon. At the same time as I was losing trust in one corporate web site after another, I found myself following over the last few years increasingly more web sites and blogs created by INDIVIDUALS on platforms such as Twitter, Google+, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Medium. So far, I have been loyal to my picks and should they get banned by Twitter or by YouTube I am reasonably certain that I could find them again as long as browsers themselves do not block valid IP addresses.
This is an amazingly positive development. For the first time in human history, an individual without the establishment support or even without a corporate structure can bypass, bitcoin style, the media intermediaries and and gate keepers altogether and change the course of history through his or her bold action amplified by resonance of millions of individuals listening to their message on broadband internet. Such was the case with Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Donald Trump, each of whom acted and succeeded without the support of established ruling class, often despite their fierce opposition. For now, at least, all three can be followed by anyone on Twitter. There were others who tried and failed, and they too are heroes of this new age.
My news feeds are in fact comprised of direct links to individual writers across the world and the political spectrum. In addition to the above three, I follow on Twitter Ron Paul, Kim Dotcom, Glenn Greenwald, Dr Robert Epstein, John McAfee, Caitlin Johnstone, Tucker Carlson, Milo Yannopoulos, Mark Karpelles, Jim Rogers, Rachel Maddow, Esther Dyson, Charles Krauthammer, Walt Mossberg, Newt Gingrich, James Damore and many others. While some of them perhaps make your blood boil, I found that none of them changed in a major way their beliefs and the point of view of their posts. I may not agree with them, but I trust every one of them, which I can not say any more about the vast majority of mass media, both on the left and on the right. I am also linked with hundreds of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Medium. Without any doubt, there will be more social platforms emerging on the web over time.
My background is in 3D graphics and AI. When I started to work on wearable personal assistants, I realized that AI simply could not deliver on its lofty promises (see my Medium blog, AI, the Hoax of the Century) and I switched to neural science under the mentorship of Berkeley pioneer, Walter Freeman. He taught me that human brain is nothing like a computer and 100B+ neocortex neurons do not form AI like rigid “neural networks.” Rather, they form dynamic transient fields in multiple frequency bands, from Alpha to high Gamma, spreading through the brain at the speed of light. In my view, the resonance of large populations of cortex neurons is very much like the resonance of large populations of web users connected with fiber optics and communicating via Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat or Instagram. In both cases these resonant fields are an emerging self-contained phenomenon outside of the control of some “central regulator,” be it frontal lobe resident “executive process” in the brain or US based Federal Reserve in Internet economy. This is perhaps the explanation behind the bitcoin $4,000 price.
Just like my social networks above, person-to-person networks form relatively stable structures over time. But here is the kick: when the critical mass of people resonates with a message of the single user, like the fired Google employee James Damore, a fast transient fields form and spreads across the internet like a wildfire. These fields could be anything from a global music fad like Despacito to a political revolution like the 2011 Arab Spring. While these dynamic fields are fast and global, they are self-induced emergent phenomena which no single central regulator can cause or control.
Like George Soros, Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg are right to see the emergence of global society. They are wrong, however, to assume that they can control it with direct censorship, Google and Facebook created “fake news” filters (see my blog, The Truth, the Facts and “Fake News) and manipulation of search results. For no single entity can control resonant and non-linear dynamics of billions of people interacting at the speed of light over the internet. A global world society does not need a central regulating mechanism to make it work, nor does it need a central world government. It exists in a chaotic but stable, far from equilibrium state, just like any complex energy exchanging living system. When it comes to markets, $4,000 price of bitcoin proves that it was Ludwig von Mises, rather than John Maynard Keynes who got markets right.
