The internet is not about just replacing newspapers. It’s about how the news ecosystem is now organized. Journalism used to have a monopoly over news delivery and agenda-setting. This monopoly is now gone.
Emancipation of Authorship
The Medium Is the Emancipation
Human as media: The Emancipation of Authorship is the potential given to the majority of citizens to promote (or publish) their ideas far beyond their immediate circle.
The medium is the breakage
With the limited access to authorship in the predigital eras, the linear and structured written narrative fostered “long-range” rationality. Non-literate media, starting with radio, TV and now the internet, favour “short-sighted” emotionality.
How both old and new media polarise society for profit (or survival)
Why polarisation is a media effect and what we can do about it. Populism and polarisation are structurally embedded into this social-economic symbiosis. This media hardware can and must work only with this cultural software. Excerpts from the paper. Full… Read More ›
Ownership of the media: it is not what you think it must be
Traditional media owners may still control the news media, but they no longer control the news. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). Under the idea of ownership as a filter of the Propaganda model, Herman and… Read More ›
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. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020). On November 15, 2011, soon after midnight, the… Read More ›
Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers on Podcast “Worker & Parasite”
On the podcast this week, Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers: The Media After Trump by Andrey Mir. Next time: Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann and Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid,… 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. A… Read More ›
The New York Times: from “We are not American Idol” to “We are not resistance” (which is gone, too).
The news validation within a certain value system is the only remaining function of news business that might have relative use-value for readers. The need for the business to survive forces the media to shift its operational emphasis from news… Read More ›
Sourcing: news supply in the media. The switch from news to opinions and from bureaucrats to “experts”
Herman and Chomsky thought that government and corporate bureaucracies subsidized the media by supplying news, as it was rather expensive to have correspondents everywhere. And they were right. But now it costs almost nothing to get evidence from wherever you… Read More ›
Human as Media 