In Defense of Corporate Media’s Marketing…just this once

May 21, 2008

Is web 2.0 actually dividing us?

The Internet has provided us with an open market of ideas, contacts and experiences from around the globe. Or at least the opportunity to find them. But what was that saying about a horse to water?

Now, I love the idea of a global village. But there is a roadblock. It’s called “the constitutive other.”

Here’s one fine example of that being exploited. According to polls on voting habits and approval/disapproval ratings of incumbent representatives, Americas political rift has been splitting exponentially within the past few years.

Many scholars, media minds, politicos and culture watchers speculate that this fissure’s break really hit its speed with the establishment of the Fox News Channel. My argument to that would be perhaps NPR, or to a lesser degree, CNN were there first. The differences are political leanings and the tenacity at which they lean. But, before any of that there were AM radio pundits.

TV. Radio. That’s the old media. The new media is a wild stomping ground of opinions from the left, right and center (and some seemingly from outer space.) But how many people peruse the spectrum? Apparently, very few. As a Stanford study points out, the vast majority of people who follow old and new media get their news from few sources. Those sources being of one political bent or another. Furthermore, it seems that the bigger the issue, the more the source adherence.

So, who is to blame for people only wanting to hear one side of the story? Is it the corporations that own the media peddlers? I suppose one could say that, and many do.

But looking a little deeper points out why media venues go political. It makes marketing sense. So let’s string up the marketers!

Wait, one step deeper - if people weren’t buying, no one would sell. So, who do we direct our ire towards?

Ourselves, I guess. Dammit.

People like to hear what is within their view of the world.

Web 2.0, 3.0, etc, has a lot of promise ahead. It could be a road to a digital shangri-la. Now we just have to master our own nature.

If nothing else, we at least we have factcheck.org to help us sort things out.

By Mike

Filed Under Technology, Criticism, The Process

Comments

Leave a Reply