Media Matters
Years ago, when cable television began to proliferate across the land, cultural critics noted that it was balkanizing the public. In the old days of three TV networks, people watched the same set of shows, which meant they talked about the same set of shows at the office or at social gatherings. Even into the 1990's you had "appointment television" like Melrose Place, but the trend was clearly toward niche programming and away from universal television culture.
The counter to this complaint was that most people would not have watched a show like M*A*S*H if they had other options. The unifying effect of network television was an illusion, the result of an oligopoly with three sellers. Further, those three sellers had an agreed upon cultural outlook, so they packed their programming with the same cultural bias, a bias that was not held by the majority. In other words, the unifying aspect of mass culture was always a mirage.
There are arguments in favor of both positions. The unifying effect of the old mass culture would have worked if the people running Hollywood did not view themselves as the vanguard of the revolution. If Hollywood had been dominated by a chauvinistic WASP elite, the 20th century would have been much different. On the other hand, a marketplace of entertainment gives people a defense against radicalism. When you have choices, you can choose to dissent from the radicalism.
Something not considered in those old debates about the unifying or fragmenting effect of the mass media is the impact on the elites. Just as people can live within cultural silos now, our elites can build for themselves a world that reinforces their own preferred view of the world. The old mass culture not only forced the hoi polloi into one tent, but it also forced the elites into the same tent. That meant they had some idea what people were thinking and saying about them.
These days, the mainstream media engineers its programming to give the managerial elites the fuzzy-wuzzies. The trucker protest in Canada is a good example. What should be the top story in the English speaking world is being treated by the mainstream media as a secondary story. Drudge has nothing about it right now. The Globe and Mail, has more Ukraine coverage than trucker coverage. The top story right now at the Toronto Star is about infighting in the Conservative Party.
Outside of these main channels, people are talking about this trucker revolt because it feels like something important. Thousands of truck drivers spontaneously organizing a revolt against the state does not happen every day. The Prime Minister fleeing the capital is the sort of thing we associate with societal collapse. Normal people are paying attention to this event and they are noticing that the people in charge are trying hard to ignore what is happening.
This is one result of the fragmentation of popular culture. In the old days, the people running the media would have known this is a big story. They would have no choice but to cover it, which would have told the rest of the managerial class that it was a big story and they needed to address it. The propaganda come from the state would have reflected this reality. The media would have asked politicians about it and the politicians would have wanted to talk about it.
Today, the people in charge just talk past the general public. The mass media feels like an internal monologue of the collective mind of the managerial class. Millions of Canadians are cheering on the trucker revolt, but the nation's top news site is posting articles in favor of corporate censorship. It is as if the people running the site are living in a different world from the rest of us. The fact is, they are living in a different world now and that world is divorced from our world.
The weirdness of this world is not lost on people. The theme of Tucker's show on Monday was how the mass media was cheering on Justin Trudeau as he gave the finger to the truckers. Even he was struck by the strangeness of it. if that is not enough, the lunatics are piling in with the conspiracy theories about white supremacy. Here is the top opinion piece at the Toronto Star. That article should be enough to have that woman committed to a psychiatric facility. It is that deranged.
Again, in the old days the people running that news site would have spiked that article in order to not offend their readers. The editors would have known that normal people do not talk like that and would find such language bizarre and offensive. Today, the editors do not care if normal people think ranting about white supremacy is weird. They do not know any normal people and besides, normal people suck. What matters is the reverb from the managerial class echo chamber.
All that said, the trucker protest is a good reminder that once you have a rotten elite, there is only way forward. At some point there will be a crisis and the elites will fail to manage it and this trucker protest will look puny in comparison. Instead of tens of thousands in the streets it will be millions. Instead of the rulers going to an undisclosed location, they will flee the country. Until then these people will continue in their own private fantasy world.
One day, from their exile, the rulers will look back and think that maybe they should have not allowed the popular culture to fragment. Maybe three TV networks was enough and everyone was better off without media saturation. It is hard to imagine the current crisis without things like social media and cable television. When everyone was forced into the same tent, the people in charge remained tethered to reality. Their great undoing was in allowing people to change the channel.