The People Versus

There are media cycles now, like there have always been media cycles, each dictated by the functions of the media (means of transmission and distribution) and the media (the industries and institutions dedicated to information collection and dissemination) of the time period in question.

I'm not sure if the social penetration of the internet has met or surpassed that of television or radio or newspapers in their hegemonic heydays. The multipliers of speed and volume of transmission has certainly been covered elsewhere a little in the time between the rise of America Online and now, so we won't belabor it. Suffice it to say media cycles have advanced to the point where the arrival of the cacophonous deluge (somehow constant and sudden all the same time) bullies the other senses into a self-protective dullness so the things that once might have been scandal or moments get lost in a thousand tweets per second less about the things that might have happened and more about the conversation about the things that happened. Which is both safer and more gratifying, as, first of all, "things" are unpredictable and therefore scary and, secondly, if we're talking about how I feel about it or how I feel about how you feel about it, now we're talking about me, which is immediately and inherently interesting. It feels like you could disagree, but you understand that the trick of the internet news cycle is me talking about me is also you talking about you at the exact same time.

A lot comes at us quickly, yes, but that just means more to potentially scare us nearly to death, or at least to agitation. The news cycle is short not because our attention spans are (though, OK, yes), but because we can't linger on this shit, man, there's too much to know. Back in the olden times, you'd hear about something horrible, like, once in a generation when a zeppelin would blow up or when a major American city was almost wiped out by molasses. And... that was it! You had your major generational touchstone of trauma. All news was either local or had to be such a TOTAL FUCKING DISASTER to reach your bumpkin-ass ears, it rang out across cultures. And everyone would get real quiet when someone, anyone, anywhere would ask if you remember where you were when you heard about one single passenger ship full of a bunch of rich assholes sank that one time or whatever. Now we have the ability to know instantly if we want about nearly 400,000 deaths in the South Sudanese Civil War or where we can see resurgences of fucking polio or a thousand other quotidian tragedies preying on our fellow humans every tweetable second. It's no wonder we don't want. Maybe there's something better in the next thing, which, oh look! is available right now.

There's too much to process, which means nobody knows how to feel about anything anymore. Internet news, of course, is handy in that it will process all of this for you, even things as ostensibly unambiguously positive as the conviction of a policeman who murdered a person in front of a lot of witnesses. The lead-up to the climactic event always rolls up with consternation and concern trolling and shitposting, followed by wildly speculative predictions of calamity in every conceivable outcome, followed by preemptive outrage by one or both sides and, if it happens to turn out the way preferred by the left and our left-wing press, haughty think pieces proclaiming the a single event means a) a sea-change and then b) well actually, nothing (including scolding for not thinking this first), and then c) well, not nothing and then d) nobody really knows.

That's the inevitable end result of all the information: nobody really knows. It doesn't actually bother me that much as the levels of gate-keeper-ism and pre-digestion by governmental and moneyed powers-that-be are definitionally lowered by an orders-of-magnitude increase in the numbers of available outlets. So this is not that kind of a-million-channels-and-nothing's-on lament for the shallowness of the current cultural milieu. The shallowness is kind of what makes it work. Events and history and progress (if such a thing is anything) happen without regard to a momentary commentary. Today one person in a position of power can be held to account for a grievous act of criminality in the full light of day. That hasn't always been true, but it's true at least for today, without regard to what anyone has to say about it.