Politics has always been a game of consensus, and societies hold together because of some shared set of values and beliefs. Whether the uniting myths are religious, hereditary, or purely secular in their tenants, the social purpose of such national stories is to unite the people in cooperative action toward the defined goals.
Since inception, the bond that holds these nations together is media. Tracing back to the earliest forms of religious governance, this took the form of those priests and prophets who would mediate between the gods and man. Medieval kings employed both religious mediators as well as town criers – and ultimately armies if a consensus could still not be achieved. As technology progressed, the printing press gave the churches and monarchs competition from the capital-owning classes, and in to the 20th century the ownership of broadcast capital in the form of television, movies, and radio came to dominate the political debate.
And debate really is the wrong word for a discourse with such low tolerance of divergent opinions…
In an era of rapidly decentralizing online media, it is no wonder that a president intent on building consensus would start to show frustrations with the nature of the internet.
“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter,” he told the students. “And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.”
For many decades, the political spectrum in this country has been highly divided between a left and a right that don’t honestly disagree on too much. The broadcast media outlets, or mainstream-media, are big owners of capital and they’re heavily invested in the industry of military. As such, the mainstream political real has been dominated by pro-capital hawks – to the extreme that we begin preemptive wars on shaky premises and provide trillions of dollars in easy money loans to the biggest banks around at the same time classrooms are getting more crowded & people are going bankrupt from medical bills.
And new media isn’t just low in capital intensity, it is practically capital-phobic. Many a great website has been ruined by large investment, and few of the biggest sites are even able to turn a profit on their massive volume. Where the traditional wisdom has long been that economies of scale are desirable, the function seems to be unraveling in 21st century media distribution.
The government really just has two choices: It can either begin to decentralize like the media that enables it, or it can try to turn the new media in to something that resembles the old one. Unfortunately, despite the great loss of our most empowering and emancipating technology, many of those holding power would rather flex their muscles than give up what influence they have acquired – consequences be damned, of course, because most of these people don’t even know how to use the devices they’re trying to criticize…