THE NEW MILLENNIUM: MEDIA SPECULATION GONE AWRY
By the end of the second millennium, markets were showing signs of strain as speculation in internet startups came to resemble the casino-like frenzy of the 1920s, ending in sharp collapses in stock values. In both periods, investors poured money into emerging industries— radio, automobiles, and household gadgets in the 1920s; internet companies in the late 1990s —only to watch the boom end in a crash. The damage went beyond inexperienced speculators. Many dot-com ventures generated heavy losses for technology, media, telecommunications, and communications firms, investors who might have been expected to know better. Large media companies also failed to grasp the significance of the internet browser after its introduction in 1993. They underestimated the internet’s power to deliver news instantly and overlooked how related technologies, especially the smartphone, would enable millions of ordinary people to report events in real time. In this new environment of laptops, text messaging, and live mobile recording, centralized media control over news production was bound to fade, while photojournalism and on-the-spot reporting became accessible to ordinary citizens.
The new millennium brought growing skepticism toward borderless institutions within the media, financial, and industrial spheres. Many Americans came to see NGO funding networks, banks deemed “too big to fail,” and the surveillance state’s intelligence apparatus as complicit in the misuse of public money. Throughout the nation’s history, scandal and distrust has been common regardless of which party controlled Congress or the presidency. Boom-and-bust cycles, stock market crashes, and depressions were recurring features of American life. Confidence in national institutions had already been shaken in the late twentieth century by the Vietnam War, domestic terrorism, and Watergate, yet belief in the country’s larger purpose endured. The twenty-first century proved different. As trust in the broader media-industrial order eroded, a new wave of anti-media and anti-political populism emerged, marked by appeals to national sovereignty, religion, civilizational identity, and revived socialism. At the same time, decentralized communication technologies gave ordinary users greater freedom from elite control.
Government responses to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 housing crash, along with the bailout of bundled subprime mortgages, fueled populist anger at both big government and big finance. Big media was also drawn into the backlash. Many people suspected that all three were working together in secret against a public that was no longer easily deceived. Such suspicions were not unprecedented; there was historical precedent for this kind of public skepticism.
OPERATION PROJECT MOCKINGBIRD
At the height of the Cold War, the executive branch tasked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with investigating leaks of classified information to the press. Rather than focusing only on the sources of those leaks within the federal bureaucracy, the agency turned its attention to the recipients—especially media outlets, along with civil rights, public advocacy, and student activist groups. Over time, the CIA did more than monitor these channels; it worked with them. It influenced how journalists wrote, reported, and framed stories to align with agency priorities. Politically active private and nonprofit organizations also received training and funding to promote views the CIA approved. In the process, advocacy groups and media organizations drifted away from their duty to remain independent of government influence. Many Americans across the political spectrum saw this relationship as a profound betrayal and an effort to manufacture consent.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF RAPID COMMUNICATIONS
The twenty-first century ushered in a new era of communication no longer monopolized by government-sponsored “manufactured consent.” Since the invention of wireless technology in 1894, both technological and nontechnological developments have increasingly centralized the production and distribution of news. Twentieth-century technologies such as television, mainframe computers, the transistor, and the internet strengthened centralized control over information. Nontechnological developments, especially advertising and public relations—also advanced this centralization by applying insights from psychology, psychoanalysis, and neurology to shape persuasion.
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
Communication is not only about who said what, what happened, where it happened, why it happened, or how it happened. Those questions matter, but reporting also depends on broader features of a story’s media environment: how the event is presented, how often it is repeated, what distracting details are included, and which relevant facts are left out. In that sense, the medium and method of presentation often shape the message more than the content itself. This idea is captured in Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “The medium is the message.” McLuhan argued that the medium itself, not just the information it carries, should be the main object of study. Others have since applied this insight to technologies ranging from television to the internet. The phrase itself works almost like a piece of clickbait—a concise formula designed to seize attention. McLuhan illustrated this with a sign he once saw at a Toronto junkyard: “Help Beautify Junkyards. Throw Something Lovely Away Today.” The line was striking precisely because it made people notice a place they would otherwise ignore.
A message is less about content than about the effect it has on the public. For example, a newscast about a heinous crime may matter less for the details of the event than for how it shapes attitudes toward crime, whether intentionally or not. When such stories are broadcast into the home night after night, they can desensitize families to violence. Repeated coverage of racial conflict, corruption, and organized crime can also make these claims seem more credible than new information. This is known as the illusory truth effect: repetition increases processing fluency, and statements that feel easier to process are more likely to be judged as true. Prior exposure creates stronger links in memory, and both the number and coherence of those links can influence judgment subconsciously. People are also more likely to accept new claims when they resemble ideas they have encountered before. When shock value is the goal, the épatage [1] of shock jocks, much like the tabloid press, draws attention through provocative or irreverent takes rather than straightforward factual reporting.
[1] Épatage means provoking or shocking as a form of persuasion, often by violating accepted social or moral norms in order to attract attention.
CHAIN MAIL
The twenty-first century is the age of social media, which has become a near-instant platform for sharing information worldwide. Before the third millennium, similar message-sharing often took the form of chain letters sent through the mail. Chain letters, whether sent by mail or email, instruct recipients to copy and forward a message to a set number of people, often promising rewards or warning of misfortune if the chain is broken. This format later spread to Facebook and other social platforms. Many such messages rely on phishing scams or false promises of money and function like pyramid or Ponzi schemes. Others try to frighten recipients into believing that breaking the chain will bring harm, violence, or natural disaster. Some, however, simply circulate prayers or jokes and are relatively harmless, without violating mail or wire fraud laws.
TOEING THE PARTY LINE
Apart from chain letters, one of the earliest forms of real-time communication technology was the party line. In the era of landline telephony, a party line allowed multiple subscribers to share a single telephone line, a system that began with the first commercial switchboards in 1878. Although the line was shared, each household had its own telephone connected to the network. Party lines were used mainly for neighborhood gossip and had few commercial applications. It would take another half century before multiline communication became practical and affordable.
Technological advances such as Bell Labs’ development of the transistor in 1948 were the long-delayed aggiornamento that made conference calling commercially viable on an international scale. The integration of voice, data, and audio technologies that enabled conference calls soon expanded into new forms of communication during the emerging age of social media.
NEW FORMATS AND FORUMS
The twenty-first century introduced several new formats for conveying messages and devised new gathering places – both public and private – for the sharing of ideas. Unlike the Greek agora or the Roman forum of old, the modern gathering place in the public square to voice ideas and carry on open discussions on various topics is not in a public meeting place or commercial center of a modern city. Social media serves as the modern Areopagus for hearing news on the latest gods or gossip in fashion in the current year. Individuals throughout the world assemble “online”, connected in a system of multiple communication nodes, i.e., locations, that facilitate the formation of virtual online communities to exchange ideas and promote their shared interests and individual views. Digital online communities also have other formats to keep in touch with their colleagues in cyberspace, such as message boards and online chat groups. However, social media also became a quick way to spread “fake news” contagiously, as disinformation “going viral,” through the prevalence of hoaxes, memes, and psyops, spread by rumor and automated software robots. [2]
[2] Software that is automated for a task is known as a software robot. These ‘bots’ are automated to do repetitive, mundane tasks, make edits rapidly, and leave messages on message boards and user talk pages. When a user creates a robot for distribution across the web for malevolent purposes or to mislead others, the user is setting up multiple automated bot accounts. Better known as sock accounts, the ‘sockpuppet’ robot accesses a group website by a false, online identity. Posing as a member of an internet community, he speaks about himself while pretending to be someone else. Sockpuppets mislead others, while posturing an independent stance, to manipulate community sentiment by defending, praising, or supporting some cause, organization, or person. Sock accounts are also set up as strawmen to belittle opposing views in order to generate negative sentiment by advancing strawman arguments easily refutable to sideline better opposing counterarguments.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media encompasses new media technologies that facilitate sharing of content (ideas, interests) among virtual communities. Users of social media ‘gather’ in virtual communities to share insights about cultural, political and social phenomena related to topics of common interest. Common, sharable technical features of social media organizations include online platforms to enable users to share content and participate in social networking. Online interaction generates sharing text posts and comments, as well as forwarding digital photos and videos.
As a social medium, social suggests the formation of community, by assisting individuals to connect with each other to build and sustain online networks. Through social media, people can share memories, form friendships, propagate ideas and promote companies and their products. To assist the user in finding like-minded fellows in the vast domain of cyberspace, social media allows users to create individual profiles based on common, shared interests and values. This database of profiles is the common mechanism by which social media technology facilitates development of online social networks by connecting common user profiles. When users abuse their privileges on the platform, such as internet “trolls” that use the platform to sow doubt, fear, and uncertainty within a group, social media organizations may ‘deplatform’ the individual user by closing access to the online community.
Social media has social value beyond the benefit to user online communities themselves. Social media organizations strengthen civil society through their very existence. They shield society from the massive propaganda of mass media, which exerts great pressure on people, which is extremely difficult to resist, for there is a lack of democratic or popular control of mass media. The only effective remedy is to sponsor and tolerate a wide range of viewpoints, as social media is capable of doing, by undermining the dominance of constructive publics, substituting instead a wide range of discursive publics that have real discursive power. [3]
[3] Constructed Publics are not organic. They are “built” upon mass audiences that have short attention spans, that are easily manipulable and controlled by hierarchical organizations. Survey research polling used to gauge public sentiment on issues of the day collects data on attitudes, not convictions, in which public policy is thence constructed based upon the sum of responses reported. This neither measures nor manifests a range of viewpoints expressing political pluralism. A person does not become an environmentalist by ‘clicking a box’ or responding to a survey. It consists of doing something ‘active’ in aligning with a group, such as by praxis, i.e., recycling; or paying membership dues to an aligned interest group, such as the Sierra Club.
The latter above is the discursive public that political pluralism requires for meaningful public participation in self-government. Such pluralism empowers citizens to form organizations around a common goal or set of principles. They have discursive power – the ability of media and other groups to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics in political discourse. They (news organizations, political elites, interested parties, and participants in online debates) shape political discourse, by sanctioning topics that they think are important for people to consider or ponder. This is having discursive power.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is an example of a discursive public, i.e., a group of citizens organized to defend and promote a political agenda centered around a common set of assumptions and values. Its members act on their own convictions, sharing information and propagating their own views independent of mass democratic administrators of the administrative democratic state.
To officials of the democratic administrative state, an organization such as the NRA is uncoordinated opinion that does not operate through normal, approved channels. The NRA and like-groups are seen as irksome, threatening— even heretical. They are designated as ‘extreme’ by the administrative state because they do not fit into democracy administrators’ hermeneutic, (i.e., interpretive, especially that of rights and duties of citizenship vis-à-vis the Leviathan state) worldview.
Social media has also given voice to minority viewpoints outside of conventional political organizations. Their users bring issues to the public square that may deserve attention, sometimes becoming viral because it strikes a chord. Attempts to stifle free speech by self-designated “fact checkers” and the herd behavior of hate speech denunciations by “social justice warriors” through mass shaming do little to suppress, i.e., to censor, “disfavored” views expressed. Rather than undermining democracy, social media actually strengthens it.
THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO MAINSTREAM MEDIA
Besides the spawning of social media in a new millennium as the signature development of communications technology, the twenty-first century is witnessing the decline, fall, and continuing collapse of mass media organizations in their monopolization of news. Social media platforms empower viewers to interact with the content creator, i.e., to respond in real time, while old media transmits content without mechanisms for responding to feedback. Social media differs from old media in its worldwide reach and tailored relevance to the consumer of news. Moreover, as the expression goes, “the internet is forever.” Despite intensive efforts to “scrub” unfavorable content from the internet, permanent records of internet postings may be archived for storage in an offsite cloud.
Mass media organizations in the European Union (EU) and North America are not ready to roll over and die. The EU has taken a farrago of repressive measures to maintain control over the flow of information. The most far-reaching was the Digital Services Act [5] passed by the European Parliament in 2022.
[5] The Digital Services Act (DSA) established the legal framework for content review. DSA applies to hosting services, online platforms, such as social networks and search engines. The EU justified the need to establish a legal framework to address “illegal” content. The law provides no guidance on what constitutes illegal content, while it imposes a heavy burden on ‘policing’ content moderation practices of social media platforms. The Act lays out a framework for the obligations, cooperation and enforcement mechanisms between the European Commission and national authorities. Companies that host others’ data become liable when informed that this data is illegal. This differs from the broad immunities given to intermediaries under the equivalent rule in the United States.
While the DSA was billed as a necessary antidote to the plague of disinformation, critics view the act as a draconian measure of the 1984 Orwellian police state, with ministries of truth employing numbers of Winston Smiths tasked to identify and vaporize those suspected of thought crimes who long for a return to the ways of Oldspeak [6] before the advent of Ingsoc. [7]
[6] In George Orwell’s 1984, a new language, Newspeak, was designed to narrow the range of thought. Its pervasiveness resembled the Politically Correct Thought Police in our own day. Newspeak replaced Oldspeak, for its vagueness and “useless” shades of meaning – to close the collective mind from committing Thoughtcrimes or falling into Wrongthink.
[7] Ingsoc is the ideological name for “English Socialism’s” political system of the future. Ingsoc impresses upon the population a cult of personality to venerate the ruler, Big Brother. But real power is concentrated in an Inner Party of oligarchs under a collectivist banner that exercises power in the name of Big Brother.
What citizens know about the world is whatever the Party wants them to know, by inventing storylines to tighten the noose around the necks of the proles, to more effectively control the proletarian masses.
Ingsoc also has no law, only crimes. Nothing is illegal; social pressure is used to exert control, in place of law. It is hard for citizens to know when they are in breach of Party expectations; and they are in a state of permanent anxiety, unable to think too deeply on any subject whatsoever to avoid “thoughtcrime”. In our own time, law-abiding citizens of the EU are arrested, convicted and imprisoned for postings on social media. Analogously, 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith keeps a diary, but does not know if this is a crime.
Perpetual conflict and ‘never-ending’ wars are a way of life. Warring parties come and go; once a friend, then a foe. The people governed under ingsoc expect this. Not so for the EU’s 450 million residents. But the present policy of the EU’s Migrant tide overwhelming Europe is neither a policy of compassion, nor a solution to labor market imbalances. The EU is importing perpetual conflict to fight never-ending wars in the ‘no-go’ zones of Europe’s signature cities. Our hero Winston Smith did not live with war in his own milieu. Today’s Europeans are not so sure.
Despite stated claims about the purpose of the DSA, i.e., to curtail the spread of disinformation and hate crime, the EU – as opposed to its constituent, sovereign nation-states – acts as the propaganda arm of the supernational authority of the European “superstate.” The DSA empowers the Brussels bureaucracy to manipulate content, by filtering out “disfavored” commentary on large, social media platforms. Such Internet manipulation is, in effect, state-sponsored propaganda. It enables the state to use social media to influence elections, sow distrust, and to control what can be seen and heard by peoples of nations external to the European Union. This, needless to say, affronts the sovereignty of nation-states outside the EU, particularly the United States, through heavy-handed regulation of the largest social media companies – all of which are based in the United States. [8] Americans, as a rule, contemn international organizations intruding on what Americans can see, read, hear, produce, create, make, or address – especially by a supernational police state apparatus that seeks to punish opposition to those that don’t toe the party line.
[8] Elon Musk’s attack against the EU bloc reflects the deepening tensions between the United States (U.S.) and its European counterparts. The tech billionaire’s efforts to defend its relatively open platform X for expression of a wide range of political and social views is a response, not an attack, to attempts by the EU, to control what Americans – and increasingly voiceless Europeans – can express, view, and share online. Americans do not take kindly to being instructed on expression protocols by an unelected international bureaucracy, which claims to pretended jurisdiction over U.S. based companies.
SOCIAL MEDIA RECONSIDERED
I would be remiss if I did not address the negative impacts of social media on society—and there are many. Social media is not an unalloyed good. It has negatively impacted minors by affecting attention spans; detaching teens from peers which affects the more vulnerable among them to social exclusion; and exposes youth to inappropriate content. As social media’s role in news grows, questions have emerged about its impact on knowledge and the formation of echo chambers.
Critics point to studies showing social media algorithms elevate more partisan and inflammatory content. Recommendation algorithms filter news matching political preferences which increases political polarization towards ideological extremes. This phenomenon, known as selective exposure, is inherent in this medium. Individual researchers, intentional communities, and random surfers want information that supports their theses, beliefs, and interests, and avoids information that conflicts with them. Blaming algorithms for incentivizing “divisive content” or “polarization” is akin to blaming society for producing preconceived biases, junk science, and hardened criminals.
With all the fret about social media destabilizing society, the role of social media in revolutions and protests is overstated. Social media facilitates activists to express themselves, but much of that expression has no impact beyond social media. Effective activism involves cultivation of relationships, coordination of outside events, commitment, sharing of risk, and a willingness to make sacrifices. Social media, in general, is built around weak ties, while social networks, on the other hand, may have some effect on increasing participation. But one should not expect ‘networkers’ to be motivated to incur risk or to make a real sacrifice.
Others have compared the impact of social media to the Tower of Babel and the chaos it has unleashed. Sharing information, getting clicks, and receiving modest monetization as recompense for all the hours that bloggers and influencers committed does not appear to be a good use of time to put into their online activity. In the absence of discursive power, social media influencers seek to attract attention in a crowded blogosphere in unorthodox ways. Clickbait, eye candy, and viral content can be found in old media, as well as new. Cancel culture and online shaming is simply a virtual manifestation of mob rule. While social media’s content leaves much to be desired, its global reach and real-time ability to counter disinformation makes it an effective instrument for advocacy in civil society. Modern social media may not produce better outcomes than the media of yore, but it is certainly no worse.