So, what do you think of the new banner?
I’m hoping to get some more look-‘n-feel changes operational between now and Election Day, but in the meantime, one of the topics I didn’t get to during this week’s podcast on media and media literacy was the way the nature of the media changes the reality it is trying to cover.
To understand what I’m talking about, you need to keep in mind a notion integral to any form of argumentation: the audience.
Back when political speech was primarily about actual speech, (i.e., speakers such as Athenian citizens or Roman Senators speaking before groups of voters), the audience was the people in the physical space where a speaker was trying to convince listeners to vote for them (or otherwise do what they wanted).
As the world grew larger, the means of communicating with voters became more indirect. In a democracy like the US, for example, it was simply not possible to gather together voters in one location where they could be swayed by someone’s skilled oratory. And so the media (originally in the form of newspapers) became a way for a candidate to spread their message to people they might never meet.
As media became more mass (in the form of national newspapers and magazines, radio and TV networks) and democracy became more direct (for example, when actual voters got to choose the Senators or Presidents, rather than have them appointed or selected by the States), candidates began and ended their careers leading (and convincing) masses of people they would never have physical contact with. And so their messages (and their behavior) began to change based on an understanding that the new audience was not just the public, but now included the media itself.
In each generation, there emerged a candidate who understood this phenomena: Franklin Roosevelt who “got” how radio allowed him to give Americans the sense that he was sitting in their living rooms, Ronald Reagan who figured out that carefully crafted images designed for consumption by TV audiences were the way to move and sway the decision-makers who now numbered in the hundreds of millions.
In each instance, these leaders (and those who followed and learned from them) tended to modify their behavior to meet the requirements of these new media technologies. For example, it was during the TV era that campaign events were staged for the cameras and debates turned into joint press conferences where the goal became not to make a mistake (vs. scoring actual rhetorical points).
Surprisingly, no politician seems to have found a similar way to dominate the latest media technology: the Internet.
This is not to say that politicians have not been affected by the way news is now communicated (and sometimes created) via Internet sources such as blogs and photo and video sharing services. But in many of these cases, the politician in question has been the victim of this new technology, rather than its master (think about Bill Clinton brought low via The Drudge Report, or George Allen’s “Macaca moment”).
If anything, an understanding that every candidate is being stalked by hoards of partisan operatives with hand-held video phones, ready to catch them in a career-ending blunder, has caused them to become more isolated, more cautious, more fearful of error than ever before (rather than boldly taking advantage of the new media to try to dominate the news).
Perhaps we are just waiting for the next Roosevelt or Reagan to come along who will grab the helm of this new technology. Or, perhaps, we have entered an era when the media has not just become a conduit to the “real” audience (the voters) but has replaced voters to become the only audience that matters.
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