I believe we're beginning to see that happen, slowly. Younger folks tend to get their news from their friends on facebook, twitter, etc. Mainstream media sources are toward the late stage of the conversation rather than the beginning and end. I don't know that it's necessarily improving things, in that a lot of Fox News style bullshit gets passed around in the form of photos with inaccurate captions, etc. But, "mainstream" it is not.
Then again, the dialogue is still being controlled for enough of the population that the state line gets reproduced by a large number of people, possibly even the majority of people, in most instances where the state interests are at stake. Even seemingly without mainstream media, the message is well-controlled.
Some recent examples of a large percentage of people seemingly buying into the state story without question that I found unnerving: "North Korea was definitely responsible for the attack on Sony" (despite many technically savvy people having serious questions about that), "Michael Brown was definitely in a rage and running into a hail of bullets toward an armed police officer when he was killed" (despite significant evidence to the contrary), "Eric Garner wouldn't have been killed if he had just obeyed the law; it had nothing to do with his race", "Tamir Rice pulled a gun on cops" (despite video contradicting this claim).
"Your comment is impossible to address without essentially starting a flamewar, due to your decision to include several hot-button issues as examples."
Is it? You seem to have succeeded in doing so, anyway. Which is good, as I think it's worth discussing. I called out situations where a state-approved message clearly exists, and that a reasonable person could find that state-approved message difficult to believe.
"Suffice to say, Facebook and Twitter are mainstream. HN, too, is mainstream in tech circles. All of these conversations are at the very least influenced by other people."
So, if social media is "mainstream media", then what do you suppose makes media not mainstream media? What does it take to not be mainstream?
I don't necessarily agree with the comment I responded to that the "much more important" issue is mainstream media, though I think it is part of the equation that decides whether a democracy can succeed. But, I did want to point out that the control that NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. have over the messaging that reaches most people is weakening. And, what is replacing it may not be superior, at least in the short term.
I don't think you and I disagree (except perhaps on the value of mentioning "hot button" issues in this discussion).
Sigh... I wish HN would prevent replies to deleted comments. I deleted it, checked that there were no new replies, waited a few minutes, checked again, and now checked a couple hours later and sure enough, a reply has appeared.
I deleted my comment because I don't like calling people out, especially when it comes to politics. We may disagree on the value of mentioning specific hot-button issues, and that's fine. I shouldn't have brought it up as a slight against you specifically. Sorry. I was also probably wrong that it was impossible to address the comment without starting a flamewar.
The purpose of my comment was to point out that social media may be as controlled as more-mainstream media. It may be slightly harder to control or influence the conversation, but influence happens from Facebook to HN. HN's is preferable, but only because of the people piloting it.
Why do you feel social media is any less shackled than mainstream media? In many ways, it's more influential, and therefore influencing social media acts as sort of a "force multiplier." If you convince just a few people to start convincing their friends, who convince their friends, etc, the effect is quite strong.
"Why do you feel social media is any less shackled than mainstream media?"
I don't. I said roughly the opposite of that; I've said that despite mainstream media losing its stranglehold on how people get their information, there still seems to be an effective method of controlling messaging.
All I said is that while it does still seem to be controlled, it is not "mainstream media". Nonetheless, I said that it seems like I agree with you, generally speaking. I think maybe we've gotten off on the wrong foot in this conversation; I feel like you're hearing a much more argumentative tone than I believe I'm projecting.
My disagreement (mostly) was with the comment I originally replied to, that asserted that policing, as it is practiced today, isn't a serious problem (which I disagree strongly with) and that mainstream media is the real problem (which I am somewhat in agreement with, but I think it's a more complex conversation than saying, "mainstream media is the problem").
Edit: And, on the "reply to deleted comment" thing, the comment existed when I wrote my comment. I believe I quoted enough context to continue the conversation. While I appreciate the sentiment of not starting flame wars, I didn't intend to start one with my comment; I was sincere in my desire to be concrete about what I was talking about when I say that social media can seemingly propagate an approved message as effectively as a well-behaved mainstream media.
I'm sorry you had to spell it out for me. I suppose I wasn't thinking clearly at the time. Apologies.
And I apologize for my general tone in my response. I made the mistake of writing it before attending to something, and my response ended up sounding much too forceful. It wasn't my intent, and I should have given your reply the attention it deserved.
I think that that's a great talking point, but from a very practical perspective the solution is to get people to question their media (social, main stream, or otherwise) carefully. Simply removing the big channels won't fix anything.
More importantly, though, it's still just a talking feel-good point: the fact of the matter is that if a cop can blow a hole in your baby with a flashbang during a no-knock warrant it doesn't matter a hoot in hell what news you subscribed to.
>the solution is to get people to question their media
That's contrary to human nature. The solution is to make the media independent of outside interests. The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity, ban investment in media from non-media companies and ban advertisement. Alternatively advertisement could be allowed as long as the money is paid equally to all media, and the ads are randomly allocated.
Third alternative is to have a responsible government channel that competes with the commercial ones, funded by tax money and independent like a central bank. That, however, would require a reasonably decent government to begin with. This model actually works pretty well in many countries.
> The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity
What does this even mean? Media employees aren't allowed to buy groceries? Media employees aren't allowed to buy cars? Media employees aren't allowed to sell Girl Scout Cookies?
Are you sure? I agree that if any individual media outlet stopped accepting ads, it would kill them; but that's because their competitors would still accept ads. Given a choice between a media outlet with ads and one without ads, consumers will choose the one with ads, because they won't have to pay (as much) for it directly. But it's possible that if ads were banned across the board, and consumers only had a choice between paying for media or not having access to media, they would choose to pay.
>> The simplest would be to ban all media employees from outside commercial activity
>What does this even mean? Media employees aren't allowed to buy groceries? Media employees aren't allowed to buy cars? Media employees aren't allowed to sell Girl Scout Cookies?
Well, they should be allowed to buy things, but not sell things and not allowed to own stock, bonds or anything else than cash and the real estate they live in.
>> ban advertisement
>This kills the media.
You say that as if the death of advertisement-funded media would necessarily be a bad thing. To the contrary, it might be a really good thing.
> Well, they should be allowed to buy things, but not sell things and not allowed to own stock, bonds or anything else than cash and the real estate they live in.
That is highly unreasonable. They can't sell their car? They have to live in one house until they die or get foreclosed on? What do you think we would gain by chasing everybody who is remotely sane out of the field?
> You say that as if the death of advertisement-funded media would necessarily be a bad thing. To the contrary, it might be a really good thing.
If there were a better alternative, sure. But there is not. If you cut off the only source of revenue available, just about the only sources of information remaining will be run by rich people who are willing to pay to push their views onto the masses.
But how tall a hurdle is jumping your Facebook or Twitter feed, really? IMHO these (NYT, Economist) outlets are lukewarm at best.
If you'll allow a digression, even if you do think the new media is working reasonably well, let's work together to enumerate what some of the problems are with big media that, if they were addressed, would make them better:
1.) News readership (consumer) not the source of funding, sponsors and advertisers are
2.) Most large media outlets have been bought by other corporate interests
3.) Changing technology and culture has created a void of long format messaging (and the death of usual distribution channels - which maybe is a good thing?)
4.) Government drastically improved symbiotic working relationship with media, challenging its role as an effective Fourth Estate
5.) News media outlets routinely surveilled and journalists legally challenged on big stories, chilling knowledgeable informants and would be whistleblowers
6.) Political and legal barriers and costs of investigative journalism high, demand and compensation low
7.) Fundamental lack of reporting and self-reporting on media organizations themselves
8.) Lack of competition due to 'enshrined' reputations and primetime due to trust relationships with content services - plus girth of production in long tail (and in major suppliers) of low quality, uncorrected, inaccurate, misleading, politicized, propogandized, or unprofessional work due to lowered costs of production
9.) 'Gamification' of the consumer for views (thus dollars) - including the short media attention span, use of talking heads, scare media, infotainment, eccentric coverage of irrelevancies, invention of false controversies
(More welcome)
Certainly Facebook and Twitter aren't editorialized and are subject to and gamed by social media optimization. (They also don't address any of the problems listed above.) Facebook and Twitter are essentially the same as relying on rumor and heresay (nearly by definition). And we know they are heavily propagandized.
