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I often hear people say that our media consumption is fragmenting, that everyone is fracturing into informationally segregated internet tribes, that we no longer share a convergent notion of truth. This is facile
Where did you get the opinion that we are living in an increasingly fragmented media landscape? Even that phrase has a certain liminal familiarity. Almost as if it were disseminated from a centralized social organ of truth generation. Curious.
Itâs true in a trivial sense, because everyone can use the internet to choose different shows to watch and different sites to visit and different shitposters to follow. But this is irrelevant, because when an idea gets in the noosphere, it always makes the rounds
For example, here are some memes I know you have: hate speech, toxic masculinity, body positivity, social constructionism, and the idea that resistance regarding certain sociosexual trends constitutes a phobia. How did you get these ideas, if we're all living in our bubbles?
Consider what kind of statement the âfragmented media landscapeâ remark actually is: itâs a lament. Itâs a lament, by the people who control the dissemination of information, that you now slightly have the choice to tune them out. But you don't really
This isnât the old days where everyone watched the exact same television show. You want to see homogeneity? But it doesnât matter if we all watch different shows and news broadcasts because the worldview that authors them is substantially the same https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1051974863911407616
If you look one level below the surface you see the same handful of tropes and themes, always assembled in the same handful of ways, always coming to the same conclusions. The Overton window is small and itâs smaller in entertainment than ânewsââ-much smaller
Radical leftists have been teaching about social control through mass media since before the advent of television, and at all times, they were right. We should not gainsay their valuable insights, we should use their insights to gainsay their values
Whatever you may think or ŽiŞek, you have to marvel at what may be the most leftist take ever articulated: despite people being aware of ideology, they may continue to act as automata, mistakenly believing that they are thereby expressing their radical freedom
I think there is an implicit claim in the ŽiŞekian worldview that our collective memeplex is more coherent and agentic than it actually is, but at the same time the noosphere does churn out uncannily similar people despite their nominal ideological alignments
The same genes can express themselves different ways given different environmental pressures, and it is the same for memes. It's not just a question of what memes are swimming around in your head, it's a question of which ones are activated and why https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1029366250495827968
Our political formulas & our will to self-determination & our love of antiheroes and underdogs & our bipartisan conviction that we're beset upon by a state with antithetical values to ours are all the same, which isn't to say we should make peace, but to explain our need for war
We all watch enough of the same media and we all hear enough of the same things that surface fragmentation is negligible against DEEP cultural and memetic sameness
So there's no sense in which media fragmentation has given us different epistemologies or different foundational beliefs; one man loves liberty; the other, equality. Who cares if you use iOS or Android, the web is the same, and so are most of the apps.
Suppose we grant many of our enemies premises; that representation in media is important to mental health, that implicit cultural assumptionsâwe wonât be so crass as to call them biasesâshape our self identityâthat no one can actually contradict YOUR lived experience, what then?
The claim that various "disprivileged" groups and individuals are made invisible by the dominant culture is laughable; when I tune in the only thing I hear, from both the left and the right, is a discussion of the supposedly "erased" groups, always in hagiographic terms
And I get the feeling (perhaps I'm alone) that certain types of social arrangements are vastly over-represented in the media relative to the real population, and perhaps this over-representation and even glorification might be causing psychic distress to the rest of us
Then again, I see myself represented in media all the time: somehow, people who look like me are always the villains, or at best, the dopey has-beens whose only graceful or sane choice is to defer to people who are radically unlike me. Whose experience is really being erased?
The truth is that social prestige and financial security are not as correlated as one might think. It's possible to have a good paycheck and live in a safe neighborhood (what makes a neighborhood safe? perhaps something in the soil) and yet be disprivileged in many other ways
And the metrics that are used to support the claim that oppression olympics winners are disprivileged are carefully chosen to omit manufactured social prestige and include only things you can't take away from people by humiliating them: e.g. their ability to hold a steady job
All this to say Hahahahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Representation In Media Real Hahahaha Ninja Just Turn Off The Tv Like Ninja Close Your Eyes Haha. But that doesn't actually work because we're living in a society
