We are the beginning. We are the end. We are the media. We control everything. Fear us.
Nine times out of ten, when I hear the word media out in the big, bad world, they’re really talking about thought control. The folks at the big news corporations, television networks and Hollywood studios have all got an agenda and we’re surrounded by it, the helpless public, what can we do but bend, broken and brainwashed.
Though most everyone I meet outside of the media industry, for some awful reason actually believe this tripe, this way of talking about the media is archaic. For years, this was a legitimate theory of media in the 1930s, often called the hypodermic needle theory or magic bullet theory. These negative connotations are fair in the sense that the theory proposed that the mass media powers that be simply said words and everyone instantly absorbed them, much like a hypodermic injection. The key here (and the reason the theory is no longer accepted) is that the audience is powerless in the face of the mass media. So, really, the question should be, to anyone who ever says that the media is all powerful and is out to brainwash us, who gave you that idea in the first place? Were you a victim of media influence via a different means? Maybe one of your paranoid, conspiracy theorist friends posted something on Facebook and you adopted it as your mantra.
The truth is the media is heavily regulated, in almost every country that has a mass media industry. In Australia we of course have ACMA, a regulatory board that resides over television, radio and print media, controlling how biassed a report can be, if a report or advertisement should be banned from television, who should pay damages for misrepresentation and the minimum quota Australian content for a network in an effort to preserve cultural identity.
As a society, we tend to think of media as almost an institution, a machine churning out data. It is remarkable how much of it there really is, all around us. But the media should not be thought of as simply a group of people; especially in the digital age, we all contribute to the media and we all have a place in the landscape. Branston and Stafford suggest that the media “are not so much ‘things’ as places”, going on to also suggest that we indeed spend most of our lives involved in the process of media creation. No doubt if you are reading this, you have taken a photo before. There is media ingrained in almost every aspect of our modern lives and it is in many ways a positive experience of connection and sharing.
When I bring sharing and connection into the discourse, I don’t simply mean the relationships between one person to another in the literal sense in media communication, (e.g. Facebook and similar social networks) I am also concerned with the relationship between creator and audience. In many ways cinema, advertising and the written word, creates an implicit relationship and connection. You and I are connected by this very connection. Meta.
The question therefore becomes, what constitutes media?
Media is not just simply the plural form of medium, it has grown to mean much more in a modern, societal context. Media is a location, a place in which meaning is created and shared, where a relationship is born between people through a mediatorial force, a process that requires mediation and the media is this middle man, the place through which information flows not begins.
The control paradigm belongs in the mass broadcast era, an era before a porn star’s family could become influential thought drivers. It is on that note that I leave you with this quote from Kylie Jenner:
“Like, I feel like every year has a new energy, and I feel like this year is really about, like, the year of just realizing stuff. And everyone around me, we’re all just, like, realizing things.”