FYI: we are watching a substantial shift in media power occur right before our eyes and to most people, it isn’t considered anything other than a small aberration from big media’s business-as-usual.
In a nutshell: old media is newspapers and Walter Cronkite on TV. So was/is Brian Williams, Anderson Cooper, and USA Today. All cable news is old media. New media is anyone outside of the channels sponsored by big corporate interests. Basically, the Internet. New media includes things like Drudge, Huffington Post, Breitbart, hundreds of new somewhat serious news and commentary sites and millions of bloggers. The new media is still new enough to be attacked by old media for disrupting it’s former dominance.
So what is new-new media? I’ll give it a working definition: any media that has the capability to go viral in hours or even minutes and by-pass the processes of both old and new media. Trump’s tweets qualify. Twitter traditionally fits more into social media and still does. Twitter as instant news is an evolution.
Memes have been around for sometime now, functioning as counterculture entertainment, then as mainstream entertainment and ideas. They were innately viral and functioned as a natural part of the new media environment. Now they have caught the attention of operatives who understand that they can shape public opinion, action and outcomes as evidenced by the recently concluded presidential campaign. The article, “This Man Helped Build The Trump Meme Army – Now He Wants To Reform It” by Joseph Bernstein enlightens us on this new development. A sample statement within should piqué your interest: “Warfare through trolling and memes is a necessary, inexpensive, and easy way to help destroy the appeal and morale of our common enemies. … Trolling, it might be said, is the social media equivalent of guerrilla warfare, and memes are its currency of propaganda.”
So what does this mean for you? In the past, when ideas went to war, there was the heavy artillery of CBS, ABC and NBC. Fast forward to 2017, forget the tanks; they’re irrelevant, Megyn Kelly notwithstanding. You will instead be surrounded by millions of information ‘mosquitoes’ that will actually be more effective. They may be launched by ‘Big Brother’ or by a 23-year-old wearing whitey tighties in a bare apartment in Kolkata.
We can sit here and say we’re all independent and smart and can make up our mind in spite of a thousand media distractions but this will become less true as ‘memetic’ tactics are perfected by the overlords. How much less true? These observations are not pro-left or pro-right. This is not a grand conspiracy alarm. It’s how information is evolving. Whatever values you hold of any stripe, just be wary of what comes into those six inches between your ears.