Yeah, this is what we believed during what is retrospectively labeled “web 1.0”. At the time, we understood the media to be basically made of: reporters, screenwriters, etc (content creators), institutions with money and resources to turn raw content into a consumable format (producers), and institutions with access to delivery channels (tv/radio networks, publishers).
When the internet got going, we were all like, “wait a minute, I’m already a content creator, and the Desktop Publishing Revolution has already made it possible for me to be my own producer. Now that the internet can be my delivery channel, I can do everything that the media does. I can BE the media!”
Today, everyone is a content creator - often without even trying. Production is easy, and in a lot of cases totally optional (hi YouTube). There are more delivery channels for your content than you know what to do with. And yet it’s still the same institutions who control the discourse in our society. How are they still doing it? Maybe “The Media” is more complicated than we anticipated.
Today’s media networks are actually networks on many different levels, not just channels for producing and broadcasting content. Both me and General Motors have pages on Facebook, but we might as well be on different planets when it comes to our power and influence over discourse. The reasons for the power difference are subtle and multifaceted, but the prominent surface similarities make us identify much more with the media than we used to in the television age.
So yeah. that may be partly why we hear less criticism of “the media” from radicals these days, because we see ourselves as part of or complicit with it, rather than colonized or hypnotized by a distant and unaccountable power.
