Media matters

 

Some reflections on the current media landscape…

The last 10 years or so, the media landscape has become more homogenous. The traditional distinction between the serious and high brow morning papers on the one hand, and the sensation-hungry tabloids on the other, has largely disappeared. In Sweden, tabloids have somewhat ironically become more “serious” (relatively speaking), while morning papers have been dumbed down. You don´t have to become like The Sun to become dumbed down. You simply go from high brow to midwit, or from midwit to halfwit. In Sweden: Dagens Nyheter (at least last time I looked – like five years ago).

Another change is the gradual incorporation of social media flame wars into the standard news cycles. Unsurprising in the case of tabloids, perhaps, but at some point, serious morning papers started treated the social media bubble as great news. When your morning paper starts bemoaning “the silence of Taylor Swift” or claim that “the Blue Wave” has something to do with Swifties registering to vote, then you know something has changed, and it probably isn´t electoral politics…

I´m old enough to remember a time when at least morning papers were supposed to have gravitas (or some kind of high brow implicit irony), not the bizarre hysteria they espouse today. Nor did they constantly sperge about “the current thing”, rather they could write about 15 different crises at the same time. Today, by contrast, hysteria is near-perennial, but always about one single thing, which is then completely replaced by another one (almost inexplicably). Witness the swift transition from the COVID pandemic to Ukraine, and now from Ukraine to Gaza. The only exception to the rule is Donald Trump, that fixture of the media landscape, who has become some kind of permanent crisis in his own right. Nor are the crisis ever explained or analyzed properly, instead all we get is 100% propaganda. It´s like experiencing “Wag the Dog” in real life. Soon, we won´t even know whether there really is a war going on in Ukraine at all, or if it´s just some deep fake simulacrum…

It´s easy to blame “the establishment” or at least “the media establishment” for all this, but here is a heretical thought: what if the real culprit are *the readers* or should I say consumers? Maybe IQ levels are simply lower today than 20 years ago. I mean, a case could be made! But the ultimate irony is that the “opposition” is arguably even worse than the establishment. For who is the “alternative” in this bleak, dumbed down media landscape? Yes, you guessed it: even more dumbed down “content creators”, edgelords and shitlords producing dank memes, funny perhaps but of course leading nowhere. But sure, they are at least “relevant” in the sense that they are just as low IQ as the establishment (and its activists) they are fighting. This is a dramatic example of what the Situationists warned us about: that even the rebels become part of the Spectacle. Indeed, there can´t be any spectacle without a suitable villain. Or perhaps clown…

My prediction is that at least the social media bubble will burst in the near future, for a wide variety of reasons, the most immediate being that most people won´t have access to social media anyway, either due to rising costs or government censorship. Then other channels must be sought to get the message out, at which point all the Alt Right edgelords will mysteriously disappear back to their mother´s basements, since they won´t be able to make ends meat (yes, all the shitlords are monetized by the same media establishment they are pretending to fight). The positive thing, I suppose, is that real reality will assert itself again. The negative? Probably that people´s IQ will be even lower 10 or 20 years into the future, so the post-Internet media landscape might be even worse than the current one!

Make of these reflections what you wish.