Mass-Mediation

When we think about how we know something, it's customary to talk about how everyone has biases and filters. These range from biological ones (left-handedness, colour-blindness) to more technological ones (hockey sticks, red lights) to cultural ones (tea-drinking, attitudes to Japanese films).

But the world, as altogether too many philosophers have pointed out, is what people make of it. The interpretation of dreams, and of visions, and of the perception of the real, is what gives power over what people think they know and what they feel they believe. This is the mediating role that merchants of understanding play in the ecology of the idea marketplace.

We are all both buyers and sellers in that marketplace. When you watch a movie and give an opinion of your own, you are a seller; when you pass on someone else's review of that movie, you are a re-seller; when you 'buy an idea', that is exactly what you do.

The great and powerful agents of this market, however, are the mass-media giants. When you read a newspaper, it is the selection of 'news' and its presentation that determine how you view the world. Since a lot of the 'news' is mediated through a handful of agencies and a double handful of newspaper houses around the world, this becomes the world we live in and know.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does move our knowledge of the world away from the empirical and into the mediated realm. We no longer know things immediately (that is, without mediation, without having things 'in between' the world and us) but know things through their media presentation.

That is why large-scale triumphalist or exceptionalist narratives are so greatly loved. We all love a happy ending, we all love to be on the winning side, we all would like to believe that we are special people. After all, what is new is not 'news' unless it is exceptional and peculiarly interesting.

The problem, really, is that we are now blanketed by media exposure. We read too much, there seems to be too much happening, so we accept what we are told and then counter our guilt by affecting cynicism. We say, "Oh, you can't believe everything you read." What's worse is that we can't even read in order to decide what to believe, since we've decided not to believe.

Here's a little jolt.

There is exactly as much happening in the world right now as there was 5000 years ago. It's just that you're hearing more about it from people who are making money out of you wanting to know more about things that really have nothing to do with you.

Yes, there are more people on this planet. There are also fewer of the truly beautiful and interesting animals and plants that used to share it with us. Yes, there are more buildings (and bigger ones) on this planet. There are also fewer languages, fewer cuisines, fewer styles of architecture.

The media that lie between us and the world act as a sort of collective screening. The good part is that it can bring our attention to things that matter and which we wouldn't otherwise know about. The bad part is that it can bring our attention to things that don't matter and which we wouldn't otherwise know about.

Now we all have to learn a new skill: how to mediate the media. I have this image of us all in the space between two mirrors, with our knowledge of self and the world dwindling into smaller and smaller reflections.