4 The Money

Consumerism

Media and citizenship have a relationship that centers around messages, and the dissemination of those messages is generally dictated by a number of economic issues. For example, how people spend their money and how they view commercial advertisements have an effect on citizenship behaviors.

In a democracy, the role that journalists play in citizenship is often that of storytellers. However, journalism is a business, so they do have to keep their financial situation in mind as they decide which stories they’re going to tell and how they’re going to present those stories. In this way, the media helps to create a public narrative that people use to decide what kind of decisions they’re going to make.

In addition to being informational, this narrative also motivates the public to make decisions. An example of this from America is Obama’s “Yes, We Can” slogan. This is an example of a story-tellign slogan because when he’s saying, “Yes, we can”, he’s referencing the American people in general, but at the same time, he’s referencing the improbability of him becoming president. So the slogan took on a narrative that basically said: If I can do this, we can do this.

One of the challenges that journalists have, though, due to the way the industry is financed, is that they often conflate “the voters” with “the people”. Journalists themselves are very often part of the voting public. So it’s easy to overlook the fact that a lot of citizens are not necessarily people who can or do vote, and that there are a lot of other organizations that have an influence on our elections. For example, labor unions and social justice movements also play their role in telling the story of their community. An example of this is that this is decades ago the mayor of New York City did not support low income housing, until CBS showed a video with a group of very diverse people demonstrating for it and then this actually changed the mayor’s mind. The media had a real impact on a politician and the policies that he was advocating for.

The stories that journalists decide to tell are often from the point of view of a corporation because those corportations play a role in funding journalism. A common narrative is that a lot of these corporations like to portray themselves in the media as victims.  For example, in Garman and Wasserman’s 2017 book, they describe how a bank in South Africa created a commercial on TV that was attacking a government backed bank, the National African Bank. With this commercial they had paid actors in the commercial who were acting as real people. But the general public did not know that they were paid actors. Thus, a private company was competing with a government company, and the private company put out a deceptive advertisement attacking the government company. Yet, this information was not well known to the general public. The idea here is that the media drawn from and serve the interests of people who have the power. So the media sees the world from basically the point of view of people who are at the top is pretty unusual for journalists to write a story about what it’s like to be an everyday average American, for example.

Likewise, consumer culture can make people feel like citizens by exercising personal choices in different kinds of market options. In other words, big corporations influence journalists, and journalists influence consumers. Garman and Wasserman’s book also argues that consumerism is a political issue in many ways, and understanding this connection between the financial side of life and the political side of life can help us address issues of inequality and improve public connection in everyday life. In other words, it’s very difficult to separate how we spend our money, and politics because politics affect how we spend money and how we spend money affect politics.

An example of consumerism and citizenship is that South Africa’s economy was built on exploitation and trade of gold and other raw materials. So the apartheid government made sure that South Africans who are white had access to political power, but they also had access to malls, consumer goods, and international travel. So the building of malls and international brands, like McDonald’s, were seen as progress. But there was also a boom in local goods as well. And what’s interesting about that in the relationship with citizenship is that you have this feeling that buying these clothes and wearing them is supporting your community and therefore it’s not just a very colorful outfit. It’s a statement about who you are and where you come from.

Historical Persepctives 

If you are going to be able to engage with media in a way that promotes informed active and responsible citizenship, it’s helpful if you can take a peek behind the curtain and see how different media industries work. If you know some general information about mass media industries, then you understand why organizations make the decisions they make (what’s influencing them) and how they might be influencing you. Likewise, it’s important to have a background in how these industries have evolved over time, and whenever we’re looking at historical perspectives, what we’re really doing is looking for patterns.

Perhaps the most important thing to do when  studying history is to see if you can identify patterns over time so that we can take better guesses about what’s going to happen in the future, and make better decisions based on that. It’s also useful in analyzing modern day issues.

For more detail on this topic, I recommend Introduction to Media Literacy, by James Potter.

Although mass communication h as existed for a long time, we really see an explosion of mass media was in the 20th century in which new technologies for communication were developed. It started with motion pictures, and these originally were little individual viewfinders, rather than large screens. Basically, they looked like boxes that one person at a time would look into it and watch something and then the next person in line would look into it, and the “movies” were pretty short.  Then those developed into black and white films that were able to be shown to like a whole audience at once.

The Telegraph was another really important communication invention, because this allowed messages to be transmitted across
large spaces, physical spaces, from one state to another state, in a really quick amount of time. So the telegraph was really just a wire, but Morse code is what allowed people to be able to use the telegraph for communication, using dots and dashes (longer and shorter beeps) to transmit messages.

Then we get to the wireless radio and wireless TV where we can send picture through the air. And then we get computers and the internet obviously, changes everything.

So we see the development of all these different kinds of things. And it’s important to note that with the development of new technologies, we do see massive changes in society. Technological determinism is the idea that technology changes us, not just as individual people, and it doesn’t just add conveniences to our lives, but it changes the whole way that we communicate and function as a society. It changes you know how we have to think about laws and policies and the way that humans beings just go about their daily lives.

Here’s an example of that, I pay my bills online, but we didn’t used to be able to do that. We used to have to pay by mail by writing a check. This created a whole new field of work and expections for bill paying.

But new communication technology also impact us as individuals differently. When mass media was first coming about people expected that mass media would create a mass audience; there was this fear that we were all going to turn into kind of robots because we’re all fed the same information. For example, if we’re all watching the TV shows that are the same, it’s going to create this similarity in our decision making and personalities control us.

Of course, that’s not what happened because people are really different than each other. So even if we are watching the exact same TV show, we’re not really watching the “exact” same TV show, because there is no such thing as a mass audience in the traditional sense since we’re all doing it a little bit differently. Let me give you an example, imagine that we are watching the Super Bowl. I don’t know a lot about sports. So let’s say that you and I are sitting down and watching the Super Bowl, imagine that you are someone who does know about sports, you’re we’re going to be seeing things very differently than me. If you know the rules of the game, you’re going to be able to notice, remember, and pay attention to things that just would pass me by. If you have a particular team you’re rooting for, you’re going to be more emotionally engaged in the in the competition. Yet for me, I’m just not experienced enough in these kinds of things to really engage with it as deeply as someone who is kind of an expert in the rules of football. So you would actually see and remember things that I wouldn’t.

So what is the purpose of mass media, here’s something that we want to keep in mind, as far as our relationship with the media goes is that they’re in it for the money, right? So mass media is a business, we have the technology, it’s you know, we have the internet, computers, TV, those are the technologies. Mass Media itself is a business. And so the business is after that bottom line, that economic gain. So no matter what the program show is that you’re watching listening to, or a social media platform that you’re engaging with, your goals can be very different because there’s no mass audience. Maybe one person is logging on to social media to get ideas for something they can do at work, or they want to find artistic inspiration; someone else is logging on to social media because they’re feeling sad, and they want to connect with other people. So they have different purposes. But the social media itself has got one main goal here. That’s that money. Their goal is to start off by making you watch whatever it is, it’s a TV show, radio program, social media, the goal is for you to start using it and want to continue using it. This is a very purposeful procedure that they go through. They have analysts and statisticians and psychologists who will try to figure out once we get you to bite once we get you to start watching, what can we do to get you to continue watching. For example, if any of you watch those shows like The Bachelor or the reality TV type stuff, they have a very clear pattern that they use and different kinds of neat
tricks to keep you wanting more.

So that’s kind of how that works. But like I said, one of the most important things for us to do when we talked about history is to look for patterns. We definitely see patterns when it comes to how people engage with mass media technology. So let’s talk about the life cycle of technology. Of course, the first step is innovation. So let’s say you’ve designed a new software program, maybe you’ve created a dating site, that’s your innovation. The goal is to make money. So you’ve got to get people interested in it, sell, sell, sell, advertise, advertise, advertise. So there’s our innovation stage. And once you get people in it, you got to get them to stay in it. So you’re going to try to get them hooked. And you’re going to try to grow it as well to get more people involved on in this. And eventually it’s going to peak. And when it’s at its peak, this is where a lot of people in your segmented audience are engaging. So for most mass media, the goal is not to reach the majority of people. You know, taking a look at the United States, the goal of a TV show is not to have every single American watching it. And everyone knows that’s just not realistic. Their goal is to find a particular audience, usually, they might be targeting young people, old people, male, female, gay, straight, whatever demographic they’re coming up with, they’re targeting certain people with their mass media, and reaching out for them. And then if they’re doing well, then it’s been a peak, and everybody’s on it. And what happens after a peak, you know, there’s always some kind of decline. And the decline can happen for a number of reasons. Maybe the technology that you invented here, it’s awesome for a while, but something else comes around that’s a little bit better or more advanced. So that’s why it declines. Maybe just the novelty wears off and people are not interested in it anymore. Think of one of those games that people were really interested in for a while like Pokemon Go. It was very popular; everyone was walking around with their face in their phone, trying to catch these imaginary Pokemon monsters. And then all of a sudden, overnight, it’s totally uncool to play, Pokemon Go. So it went from super cool to super not cool. So a variety of reasons for it to find, but they they always do decline. When they start to decline, they’re probably going to try to adapt. So the people who created Pokemon GO, or whatever that invention is, they’re going to try to figure out why they’ve declined and try to adapt to that. And that process of adaptation usually leads to new innovation. And then we see the cycle happening all over again, where they’re continually adapting to the changing social environment, or they die. And so that kind of thing can happen too. So if they fail to do their adaption properly, that kind of
either the technology is not used anymore, or the business and usually it is the business that will go under. So that’s primarily the stages of how mass media works. And no matter what technology or business you’re thinking of, they pretty well fall into this lifecycle. So it’s important to think about what are they doing, to try to get you to engage and just try to follow through this cycle of adaptation. But one thing that is missing from that cycle that I think is really important to talk about is the idea of monopolies media monopolies, you can call it a takeover. If you want to use the really nice euphemism word, you take convergence, but really what it is, is it usually happens during this during this peak phase one business will usually kind of take over that company, right. So like, for example, with the telegraph, you know, one company kind of owned all of the Telegraph, or you might have one company owning all of the while we’re going to talk about local news and how a lot of local news stations on TV are owned by the same company. So we see this development of Monopoly very often in the in the peak phase. And there are some pros and cons to one company kind of having massive control over a particular communication technology.
or business, you know, in the case of, for a while there, Facebook was like really the place to go for social media, it seems like, that’s not where the cool kids are anymore.

But monopolies aren’t necessarily always a bad thing, there are some potential benefits. For example, when one company owns everything, they can really standardize a lot of stuff. They can keep their software coding the same from company to company, an actual products, like, you know, phone chargers, or something like that can be standardized, though, there’s a lot of convenience to the general public by the standardization. It’s also there’s a lot of benefits for the company. If they own everything, obviously, they can make a lot of money. And one of the strategies that they may have is if there’s a business, that, you know, they have their toes dipped into both like newspaper and television, they can share their message on both of those mediums, and then that revenue just starts really beefing up for the company. So there’s a benefit for them. But another benefit for the customers is that sometimes these kinds of monopolies make things really easy. You know, like, let’s say that you want to find in a book that is not a very popular book, or super duper excited to read it. And you just can’t find it at your local bookstore, you’re probably going to find it on Amazon. Amazon makes things so easy. And they they don’t have like a true monopoly on books. But they certainly you never know why they’re heading in that direction. But there are also some downsides to when one company has control over a technology or business. Of course, number one, they’re in control. So they set the prices. And so that can really increase the cost to consumers. And not just consumers, but other innovators. So it might decrease their access. I think the scariest part of monopolies is that we won’t ever know what we don’t know. So and these new companies that are unable to develop because someone else has monopoly of it, people who are unable to access it, because it’s too expensive. It just creates a black hole of the unknown because those effects cannot be measured.

How Big is too Big?

So, I’d like to start by talking about local news. This is important, because a lot of people believe that their local news is owned, operated and completely focused on local issues. But as it turns out, a lot of local news, especially television, local news, are owned by large corporations.
Sinclair is the largest of those. One of the things that we see happening with Sinclair is that they will sometimes give their newscasters these scripts that they require them to read. And so what we see then is one corporation having quite a bit of control over a large amount of local news, without the public being aware of the fact that this is a nationwide thing. SMoving on to big tech companies.

When referring to big technology giants, when we say big, we basically are referring to power; how much power does the company have? Generally, when we talk about power, that’s a couple different things. One is capital, money. But the other is data, how much data do these companies have on their customers? This data can be translated into money since it is used for advertising.

A lot of these big tech companies that have information on people that they’re they’re using that data are social media, there’s not all social media, there are companies like Google, which has more data than any other company, or Amazon that are more product based, that are having a lot of data over people as well. So there’s a link here, if you want to go, this is a Newsweek article, you could actually open it up if you wanted to. But let me just summarize, this is a big deal, because just these two organizations have 70% of web traffic. And another reason why this is problematic is something called proprietary marketplace. So what this means is that a company has a marketplace, and a marketplace is where something is being bought and sold, it might be actual products, like chairs, blankets, whatever, or it might be a service that’s being sold. And a proprietary marketplace, is when the company owns the marketplace, but they’re also selling products or services on the marketplace. And Amazon is a really good example of this because they are a marketplace, right? amazon.com is a place that people can go to buy and sell products. But Amazon also makes their own products which they sell in their marketplace. And this can lead to some conflicting interests. Because, you know, like, you take a lot of these smaller businesses, and maybe they have an idea for a new product, but they need access to customers. So they might want to sell their product on a website like Amazon. When they do that Amazon then has access to the information about their product. And they can then turn around and make that product themselves, usually at a lower cost. Because they’re a big company, they can afford to do things cheaper. And it ends up running a lot of these small businesses out of business because they can’t keep up with Amazon. So for these small businesses, it’s kind of like, well, we can join Amazon and risk them taking our ideas, or we can not join them and try to compete with them. But how do you compete with a company that is that large, and owns its own marketplace. So there are no easy answers here. And as with most things in life, it’s not all good or all bad. There are some benefits to having a proprietary marketplace. For example, it can lower the cost of goods to consumers. But there are some negatives as well. And our job is to be informed about both the pros and the cons. But one of those cons, and this is the same, this is the same paper as this one is showing that this does have an effect on new businesses and small businesses. And we see that they are declining since 2012. So despite the fact that the internet has this open marketplace for people to buy and sell goods, we actually see a decrease, not an increase in small businesses. And this can have a cyclical effect. So once a company becomes very large, it becomes easier for them to continue growing, which obviously causes a cycle. And one of the reasons why it causes a cycle is because of the reduction in taxes. And I do have a New York time citation here. If you want, you can read that yourself. But I can summarize the main points.

The idea is that when a company becomes very large, they get a lot of power. And so for example, we’ll use Amazon again, when they were building a new warehouse. They basically have cities competing for their attention. And part of that competition means that certain cities would offer them lower taxes. By paying lower taxes, Amazon is able to make more money. So you have these big companies, and it’s becoming easier and easier for them to make more money and often shutting out the little guy. An example of a company that had some kind of regulation is Microsoft. So back in the 1990s, Microsoft was the cool kid on campus. And it was a growing company. While they were growing though they were sued by the federal government for violating monopoly laws. And they settled that lawsuit which resulted in Microsoft not becoming sort of a gatekeeper to the internet. It allowed for more competition so that other companies like Google could grow. You could make an argument that if Microsoft hadn’t been regulated, Google never would have been able to come the giant that it is today, which causes people debate, well, maybe Google should be regulated now. So that’s kind of the basis of the big business issue.

References

Edsall, T. B. (February 17, 2021). Democracy is weakening right in front of us. The New York Times.

McQue, K. (May 5, 2021). Instagram fuels rise in black-market sales of maids into Persian Gulf servitude. The Washington Post.