Bad news plus good crowd makes a good engagement. A teaser on the main page of the New York Times’ website on May 14, 2020 read: Almost 3 million U.S. workers filed for unemployment last week. Although the weekly tally… Read More ›
Media ecology
The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden
“What happens when journalism is everywhere?”, Mathew Ingram asked in 2011. Nine years and one Trump term later, the answer is here. On November 15, 2011, soon after midnight, the New York riot police started a raid to evict the… Read More ›
Postjournalism: from the world-as-it-is to the world-as-it-should-be
By the end of the 20th century, the business model of the media took its last and most optimal form: the media sold news downwards whilst simultaneously selling the audience upwards, to advertisers, creating a “supportive selling environment” (Herman) or… Read More ›
Polarization studies are media studies
Fake news is not the principal problem in the new media environment. The impact of fake news is already mitigated by the users’ growing immunity and also by the growing noise that diminishes the potency of fake news’ impact. The… Read More ›
Paul Levinson on the power of power and advertisers over media
The US Senate vs. Twitter, or Violating the First Amendment vs. Violating the Spirit of the First Amendment. (A prominent media theorist and author of “Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium”, Paul Levinson from Fordham University in New… Read More ›
Sourcing: news supply in the media. The switch from news to opinions and from bureaucrats to “experts”
The media cannot afford to have correspondents everywhere where something might happen. They need to rely on other networks through which important information circulates – the bureaucratic networks of government and corporations. Thus, the information supplied by the bureaucracies has… Read More ›
Postjournalism: Discourse concentration
The polarization of stances requires the commonality of topics, in which the stances have to be polarized. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the deadly clash within the great Lilliput nation was caused by irreconcilable discord regarding which end of an… Read More ›
Interjections and emojis: the digital reversal of literacy back to the origin of language
Electronic media, as McLuhan noted, retribalized society and therefore diminished the significance and influence of literacy. Retribalization of culture by the switch from literacy media to digital media reverses social communication not just back to orality, but even to the… Read More ›
Factoid. Validation by dissemination
In their newsfeed, everyone can occasionally get videos of a bear swimming in a backyard pool, a husky dog teaching a human baby to crawl, or a bunch of school bullies harassing a classmate. The video format certifies that those… Read More ›
Old media and COVID-19: news demand surges, business crumbles
Because of the quarantine, newspapers are going to die tomorrow, not in 10 years. The forever-altered tactility of the millions will harm the press even more than the temporary physical isolation from its readers. Radio will struggle but survive and… Read More ›
