Requisite Manifesto-esque First Post

Video may have killed the radio star, and new media may be replacing old media, but the media as a social engine is alive and well, and more concerned with itself than ever. Sometime during the last decade or two, the focus of the media increasingly became - well - the media. We can see this trend in shows like NPR's "On the Media," popular television shows like, "Ugly Betty" and in recent Hollywood films like "Good Night and Good Luck" and "The Hoax." Is this new trend the result of the Internet – blogging, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the like? It very well may be. In what has been dubbed, "The Age of the Amateur," anyone with an IP address can set up shop, and become a media outlet unto themselves. And why not? From the man on the soapbox in the town square, to the pamphleteer, to the graffiti artist, people have always had a desire to make themselves heard or seen by the masses; especially when they feel their ideas, opinions or culture are being ignored by the media at large.

But what is the media at large? Most of us talk about "the media" like we talk about "the government." It occupies some nebulous space somewhere out there that feeds the rest of us soundbites, articles, entertainment, and information; and until recently, it has mostly been disseminated by professionals. Of course the term professional is itself misleading, and arguably a construction of the old media. If by professional, we mean someone who is being paid to work in the media arts, then we have to admit, that before the age of the amateur, there was a direct correlation between professional media and commerce; and when information and commerce are inextricably linked, especially in a society like ours, where money exchange dictates worth, suddenly we're in danger of losing a lot of thoughtful readers. Or, as the case may be, thoughtful readers may decide to create their own media, which is exactly what has happened.

The immediacy and wide availability of Internet media has changed the way that our world operates. From the way that politics is run (case in point Obama's grassroots Internet presidential campaign or the YouTube debates this past primary season) to the way we handle our money (online banking, bill paying, PayPal accounts, eBay) to the way we consume our entertainment (between The Smoking Gun and Oprah, James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was judged more on the media surrounding it than on the book itself), it is almost impossible to discuss anything relevant to current affairs without including a discussion of the role the media, professional and amateur, is playing in the whole thing.

Well, they say hindsight is 20/20 and we should have seen this coming. It wasn't until the 1920's, notably the era of radio, that people started talking about "the media" in the pluralistic way we're so accustomed to now. The term media comes from the Latin word medius, and Merriam Webster breaks the definition down like this:

"The singular media and its plural medias seem to have originated in the field of advertising over 70 years ago; they are apparently still so used without stigma in that specialized field. In most other applications media is used as a plural of medium. The great popularity of the word in references to the agencies of mass communication is leading to the formation of a mass noun, construed as a singular."

With radio, in a way never before possible, people were suddenly exposed to the same information through the same medium at the same time. I don't think it's any coincidence that the advent of the radio in the first half of the 20th century coincides with the increasing interest in the use and the study of propaganda, and the coinage (by William H. Whyte in the March 1952 issue of Fortune Magazine) of the term "groupthink." When we're raised in a society where everyone gets their information on local, national and world events in politics, culture and the arts from corporate enterprises that have an interest in keeping the flood of information going in one direction – from the professionals to the people – it's no surprise that we end up creating a society in which "Groupthink is becoming a national philosophy," to quote Whyte's article.

Internet media, then, is in one sense a revolution against Groupthink. On the other I'd like to take it a bit further and suggest that Internet media and the rise of the amateur, while being on a very basic level a revolution against Groupthink philosophy, is actually being integrated into it in a way so subtle as to bamboozle us into thinking we're capable of moving beyond it, when actually we're buying into more than ever. Because, as we all know, the Internet can be its own hangman. Instead of detracting from the authority of the professionals, the Internet, with its endless labyrinths of wacky websites, half baked conspiracies, and outright disinformation, lends credence to the basic Groupthink philosophical premise that the distribution of information is best left in the hands of the professionals. Like an old history teacher used to tell me, whenever societies swing too far to the right or the left, they inevitably end up meeting in the middle.

The argument offered by old media apologists is that, especially with political reporting, resources are needed to do comprehensive coverage, and only corporate media has the resources to fund this kind of reporting. This argument strangely overlooks the fact that increasingly, more and more people can do amateur media from all over the world, and do a more informed, thorough job of it. The attacks in Mumbai and the current upheaval in Iran have shown us that amateurs in these regions often have more subtle and informed ideas about what’s going on than the professionals who fly in, do a little investigative reporting, and then fly back out.

In 1939, Orson Welles' radio drama, "War of the Worlds" set off a nationwide panic. Of course, the panic already existed in the form of the Second World War. Welles' radio broadcast just shed light on Americans’ already boiling anxieties. Even with a disclaimer preceding the show, the new medium of radio had the power to inspire widespread belief and panic because it already had people on edge with news of Germany's advances throughout Europe.

We'd like to think that by now we've gotten to the point where we understand our media; that “War of the Worlds” couldn’t happen again. But the media outpaces us. It evolves as quickly and effectively as we do. Every new trend redefines the media, from the suspect possibility of objectivity in journalism to the false dichotomy of the professional and the amateur. When Gil Scott Heron recorded "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," he was expressing the distrust many people had for the media in the sixties, and still have today. What he didn't know back then, and what we should know, but seem not to, is that the revolution doesn't need to be televised to be turned into just another media hype machine.