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Originally Posted by Lightspeed
Would the 30s German equivalent of this thread be "fuck broadcast media"? Because citizens of Germany were helpless to its effects, with fascism as an inevitable outcome?
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Yeah it probably would have been because visual broadcast media was the new media of that age. Media effects research actually stemmed directly from the use of media by the Nazis - a whole lot of people saw the power that they exerted with it and realised this was something they needed to understand. The first conception of how media effects worked was literally that people took on it's messages uncritically (called The Hypodermic Needle model or Magic Bullet)!
This was the reason I mentioned how Germans experienced TV - because the communal experience of media was very different to an individual experience (because you're not only reacting to the media but also to the reactions of the other people consuming it). Strangely enough the Nazis themselves helped push forward the understanding of media effects in this are - The
Spiral of Silence theory by
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann covers how some of this works (and it's still a model used in some fields of analysis these days).
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Originally Posted by Lightspeed
I'm suggesting what we're seeing is a consequence of media being one more tool used to concentrate resources into the hands of the few, as a priority over bettering the lives of those consuming it.
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See now you're talking about market models of media vs public sphere (Jürgen Habermas) - which is a good conversation to have. Look, you're not wrong that accessible platforms have provided a view of the world which people otherwise not have access to (as Marshall McLuhan had hoped TV would do with his idea of the "global village"). I used to have students complain about "complaints culture" being new, to which I'd suggest that perhaps it was just more visible due to new media forms (with the added realisation by people that it was actually okay to complain about shit they thought was wrong).
Having said that economic structures which underlie social media, and never ending push to turn content into a commodity does lead to certain sorts of discourses being promoted because they are profitable. What I'd be really interested to see would be a publicly owned and funded social media platform that was ring-fenced from both political and economic influence.