The internet and the makers of meaning
Are we mindlessly jumping from one big story to the next?
The internet drastically changed the way many industries operate, and journalism was no exception. A major change was in the structure of breaking news coverage, which changed from being a centralized job of journalists covering what was happening in the world, to a decentralized approach, where whoever is on the scene takes a video/picture and the coverage happens from the ground up. This change has been well documented. What has got less coverage though, is the impact this has had on the layer above the actual news event, the layer of meaning applied to whatever is going on in the world. This layer has become quite opaque, but I think it’s worth trying to untangle.
The old way
Something newsworthy would happen. A local journalist would pick up the story and present it to their editorial board, who would decide whether to run with it or not. If it got enough attention, the national agencies would cover it. The news cycle was controlled in this manner, and folks looked to the newspaper or broadcasters to give an accurate account of what was going on. ‘Eye-witness accounts’ were written about in papers, but never as a first party broadcaster – they were always part of the story.
Post the breaking news, the next set of journalists, the commentary and opinion givers, would write about the broader meaning of the events, connect them to other strands of history and generally provide reasoning as to why this particular event impacted more important societal issues. These analyses would be very influential on the general public. Through both avenues, the ability to decide what news to tell, and what layer of meaning to put on top of it (if any), traditional media had a lot of power. They effectively controlled a lot of the perceptions that the public held, which is why politicians have always loved or hated but always paid attention to media companies.
The new way
Breaking news is now mostly covered by the people who are witnessing the event, via their smartphones. This information is broadcast in real time via social media, bypassing any centralized structure like an editorial board. This type of information is being published on social media every second. The information that becomes ‘news’ is self-selected through many likes or reposts of the same story, often tracked through a hashtag. On public social media platforms (Twitter/TikTok/IG Reels etc.), stories that start getting traction from a bunch of users are pushed to more users by the underlying algorithms, creating a feedback loop that pushes self-selected news stories to more and more people. In this way, the social media platforms do have a lot of power in that if they upweight or downweigh certain stories, those stories’ reach changes dramatically (hence the scrutiny placed on these platforms).
Journalists in this model are not usually the breakers of news stories (barring investigative pieces). They receive the signal in real time like every other consumer. In the domain of telling what happened, their job has changed from telling the actual story, to packaging and retelling whatever the social media platforms surface as being important. This process can and is manipulated. The likes of Cernovich have spoken about this quite openly. A large group of people talk about the same thing, it gets into the social media algorithm loop and suddenly it’s being covered by the media the next day, whether the story is true or not. Traditional media still have power in this domain, as their brands have a lot of reach, but it’s a changed role from signal creator to signal amplifier.
The meta stories
Soon after a news story breaks, stories about the stories (or ‘meta stories’) happen, generally through social media, about what the motivations for the actions in the original story were and what they say about specific issues that everyone cares about. While events by themselves rarely impact a large number of people, generalizing the intentions or impact to issues that a lot more people care about increases the appeal and hence the reach of the story. Issues that large groups of people care about tend to be about basic rights (i.e. focusing on gender, liberty, national security etc.) and this is where traditional media focuses today, especially national agencies. These meta stories also usually crop up organically. As soon as a large enough group are making a similar ‘take’ on a news story, the take itself becomes the story. Media companies are trying to appeal to a large, but usually quite specific, audience type. Given they aren’t breakers of news anymore, this has become even more prevalent. As soon as popular meta takes boil to the surface, media companies will hone in on packaging these stories so that they appeal to their user bases (usually by linking them to issues that appeal on the national scale. If you ever get the feeling that literally every news story seems to be make or break about an important societal issue, this is no coincidence. This is by design.
A good example of this is Elon Musk’s recent offer to purchase twitter. The actual story (Musk putting in the offer) was in itself a big story in the business world, published through social media. The focus of the large media houses however was on the takes (the free speech angle, rich people have too much power angle, Musk’s upbringing in South Africa and how that relates to the story), which made the story a national talking point and no longer something for the business section. The actual story – Musk buying Twitter, quickly became old news, but the meta stories raged on for weeks, until the next story boiled to the surface and media agencies moved on.
A key feature of the new media landscape is the quantity of new stories and the speed at which the cycle plays out. In the old way, the news cycle moved only as quickly as the editorial rooms could process them. Newspapers came out twice a day at most, and TV/radio news ran on the hour. Given that the stories were managed by humans, they could by definition only move as fast as the humans managing them moved.
Need for speed
Nowadays, with stories being told every second of every day, a story can bubble up for a day, get a lot of attention and another, equally large but totally different story can bubble up the next. Media agencies, given their new role, run from meta take to meta take, just making sure they are relevant in their customers’ eyes for every story that is out there. Marc Andreesen has called this ‘the current thing’ and given there is no centralized body controlling the pace of the stories, they move far faster than any human brain can comprehend. The net result is a news cycle that moves so fast that no one can keep up with it, with a constant stream of meta takes pervading the public consciousness. These meta takes, always pulling to issues that the majority of people care about, tend to be quite polarizing (income/gender inequality, gun control, racial issues etc.). Politicians know this reality too, and similar to media companies, they comment on a lot of these stories in whichever way they believe that their voting base wants them to. Given the pace of the news cycle, and that most people do not remember all of the stories, the time just before elections becomes the most critical. The weeks leading up to an election encompass a flood of information dumps on social media, hoping they’ll be picked up and be the ‘current thing’ leading into voting day, being front of mind when voters are in the ballot box.
Even for those not on social media, the impact has been felt through the coverage given by papers and tv news stations, who are reporting more on meta takes vs telling the actual news (there aren’t many left who are employed to just tell the news, as that job has effectively been outsourced to everyone with a camera).
What to do about it?
A lot of folks, myself included, feel unhappy about this and the implications for society going forward. The trouble is, it’s hard to see how the situation will improve. Regulation, for example, definitely won’t achieve anything and any rules governing the frequency or style of online communication would do more harm than good. Personally, I believe that we will see software products come out in the next few years that focus on an aggregation of these trends and put them in one place on a timeline for individuals to see. The major trends will be listed, and if you want to see how a story has progressed over time you will be able to zoom into it and see the detailed feed. Essentially, you’ll have all of the ‘current things’ highlighted across time so that you aren’t just flooded with information on a daily basis. These will include audio, video and written pieces, so you can search for and see how views on topics have changed or been contradicted over time (with every segment of audio and video being labelled nowadays, all of this content is easily searchable). The point of this is to reduce the amount of information to a digestible size for the human mind so it isn’t just a constant stream of noise. Although, it’s hard to know whether such a product is actually wanted by most people. Maybe most are happy with a constant stream of information flowing through them with nothing connecting up in any meaningful way, but I’d hope not.
The internet made it possible for information to be created and distributed at almost zero cost and no time delay from anywhere in the world. This reality isn’t going to change, so we may as well get used to it. My hope is that tools come along that make this mass of information more digestible for the human mind. This may enable us to get to a place where we aren’t consumed by an endless stream of issues that has a constant hold on our attention span, and can actually figure out for ourselves what really matters. One can only hope!