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Here is a question that I haven't heard addressed in here, and which I think is an important question to ask. "The media is the message" as the (now cliche) phrase goes, so in all of this discussion of media, there doesn't seem to be a focus on the media of the media, so to speak. I don't live in the United States, and I don't watch television. I get all of my news on the internet, mostly by clicking around Google News. Even when I lived in the United States, I didn't watch television in my own home, and never regularly watched news programs, either cable or broadcast. I only saw the news if I was at someone's house, or waiting in a public place. The entire concept is a little weird to me, in fact. Televised news can be a really bad thing, even if we can imagine some ideal, impartial news, because it doesn't give you time to separate and analyze. This is especially the case if it uses visceral imagery. You get kind of wrapped up in it. Someone else could probably write about this at greater length, but obviously there is some type of psychological resonance with having a voice telling you things, showing you pictures, that makes it hard to separate and think critically. Obviously, this doesn't mean that text media is "safe", but I think that reading automatically gives more room for critical appraisal than viewing. What is really weird for me, not ever watching the news, is that when I read the USPol thread, and other threads on here, people talk about media personalities as...well, personalities. Like they are tapped into emotional relationships to these people that just don't make sense to me. Reading people talk about Megyn Kelly, or Glenn Greenwald, or Clint Cilliaza, to me, is like reading people constantly interjecting references to seaQuest DSV episodes. Like, I really don't understand the entire emotional tenor that people discuss media personalities with. Like, Clint Cilliaza is a good example. I have read some of his print stories, and think they are mediocre summaries of the news. Like, not good, but nothing I feel personally offended by. But lots of people on here talk about him as if he is terrible, and I am assuming those are the people who see him live? What is the relationship between how we consume the news (visual vs text vs audio, etc) and how we feel about it?
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Jan 12, 2019 18:35
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GoluboiOgon posted:personaly, i think that "the medium is the message" is slightly overstated. you're right that there are a huge number of visual queues on television news that are absent in print or online media, but plenty of people form emotional relationships with media figures on non-television media. i wouldn't call glenn greenwald a tv personality, for instance: he appears sometimes on the news but people mostly know about him from his constant twitter activity and his intercept podcast. rush limbaugh has managed to create a cult of personality based almost entirely on talk radio (and in the shoes of father coughlin, who dominated us talk radio in the 1930s before tv was invented). even before the creation of radio, there were print media journalists who evoked intense feelings in their audiences (thomas paine and upton sinclair come to mind, although the idea of personality is a very 20th century invention and probably shouldn't be used in this context). I am also a little bit confused by Twitter. I tried Twitter, then discontinued my account when I realized I didn't like it for either posting or reading information. I will still read some Twitter feeds, and I am not such a grumpy old man that I can't appreciate some of the funnier things on Twitter, and I like Seanbaby's tweeting. But I kind of can't understand the entire concept of Twitter itself being news: of people reading three sentences of polemics on their phone, and then getting emotionally invested in the back and forth and sick burns. I also don't listen to the radio or listen to podcasts for news or commentary. And its not like I am too aloof to enjoy watching things, I literally spend three hours a day watching people play video games on YouTube. But I don't really get into using either Twitter or Podcast or Vlogging or whatever as this emotional attachment tool to people's views on the news. Squalid posted:I've also noticed this and hate it. It's not something specific to media personalities though, people do it constantly with modern and historical people. I don't know why anyone would ever ask a question like "Was President James Polk good or bad?" These kinds of questions seem entirely nonsensical and unanswerable to me, but they are obviously very important to a lot of people. It's usually framed as some kind of moral thing, probably something to do with christian conceptions of morality which are largely alien to me so I just accept I cannot understand it. I chalk the obsession with judging people and crafting emotional relationships with public figures up to some essential flaw in human nature or our culture and assume it is an unavoidable problem we just have to work around. I compartmentalize a lot. It is a way to stay sane, both in my personal life and in the political world. I think questions of morality are important. But I also think that there are ways to look at things as the objective result of historical processes. And the longer ago something happened, the easier it is to look at in historical terms. For example, I think of slavery in the ancient world as a much different thing than I think of slavery in the United States of America. The second is close enough to me that I still think of it as a moral evil, I can't compartmentalize it the way I would think of slavery in ancient Babylon. In terms of consuming media, and this gets back to the question of the type of media, I can read newspapers and compartmentalize the information, and think about it critically from different viewpoints. If I read that the GDP of India has gone up 2.2% last year, I can kind of compartmentalize that as a standard measure of economic health that may or may not reflect the actual welfare of most people in India, but that (at least from a standard viewpoint) is probably good news for a lot of people in India. But hopefully what I can also do is keep that information in perspective that no, GDP doesn't measure welfare, just "economic production". So I should be able to read that information and put it into different perspectives, be able to still have moral views of economic justice but understand that a metric is a metric. And that is easier, with written sources, but I am probably not as good at critical thinking as I think I am.
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Jan 12, 2019 22:24
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So here is a question I have had for a while. It is an open question, and involves digging into D&D posters personal stories, which they don't seem to like to share. I went to tell my own story, and see how it compares with others'. What age did you start consuming "alternative media", realizing there were different media perspectives, or getting a critical view of the media? Did critical perspectives of the media develop over a long time, or was there an epiphany that the "mainstream media" might not be totally accurate? My own story is: I started reading the newspaper, I think for the comics section, when I was 7 or so. By the time I was 9, I would read the newspaper closely, kind of out of the obsessive desire to follow certain columns and features, rather than having a lot of comprehension of the stories. Around the same time, I would often read the alternative newsweekly, the "Willamette Week", which was a pretty standard alt-weekly newspaper that covered arts and current events. (Pretty much every city had one of those in the 1980s/1990s, right? It was pretty standard stuff, but for a 10 year old used to reading the sports section of the Oregonian, it probably seemed slightly weird. I remember around the same time, (or a few years later, I remember reading about Somalia in it, which would have been in 1992, when I was 13) my father having issues of Z Magazine, which was a more clearly politically leftist thing, and which of course was a gigantic difference from what I read in the Oregonian. So at the time, even though I still only had a hazy idea of what was going on in the world around me, I had some idea that there were alternate viewpoints. Placing them wasn't easy, but I knew the difference. Around the same time, probably around the age of 13, I remember reading some type of alternative magazine that my mother bought in an alternative bookstore, or maybe something for free, like low production values, maybe photocopied. I remember reading the back and it had a vocabulary list, and one of them was "Public Education = A Welfare System for Liberal Arts Majors". Sick burn, that! It also had a cartoon showing an inquisitive young person asking his father questions, but the father was brainwashed by the television to only care about sports, and was repeating "Go Blazers". I think the magazine or newsletter was written from a Libertarian standpoint. I don't know why I fixed this in my memory, besides it might have been my first experience that not only was there alternative media, but that some of it had its own agenda that I didn't agree with. A few years later, I was 15-17, living in Portland, Oregon. This was the mid-1990s, and for technical reasons (computers made desktop publishing easuer), as well as cultural reasons (the grunge years, openness to LGBT and different subcultures, etc), there was a flood of alternative media. I remember one newspaper, PDXS, which was launched to compete with the Willamette Week, mostly attacking it for being too mainstream. And of course, in the mid-1990s, and being a teenager, I always wanted to prove how against the mainstream I was, but then I noticed before too long that it started having more improbable stuff in it, like conspiracy theories about the Clintons. Whether that was for ideological reasons, or because they wanted to build up their fringe credibility, I don't know. But I do remember being wary of it. So basically, by the time I was 18, I had been introduced to different forms and viewpoints in the media, and had already realized that some of those viewpoints were also suspect. I still read them, even if only out of boredom (lots of free newspapers available for long bus rides in Portland), and I kind of mentally compartmentalized what I was reading, and what its purpose was. I hope that wasn't too much detail, but I think it is a good question: when and how did you start to realize there was multiple perspectives, and to evaluate them for trustworthiness? For me, it really did build up basically since I was a kid, with no single "ah-ha" moment.
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Feb 15, 2019 22:00
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wateroverfire posted:Came to say amazing thread. Yes, I am. Will be for at least a while longer. Today, I walked from Melipilla to El Paico. Which, if we were in the United States, Melipilla would have its own newspaper, and for that matter, El Paico might too, although the El Paico newspaper would be a legacy product that mostly printed coupons and reprints of obvious news items and little essays by the publisher, who inherited the newspaper from his father.
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Mar 14, 2019 04:15
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Ytlaya posted:This seems like a really roundabout and overly verbose way of just saying that you think alternative media is generally worse and less credible than mainstream media. I think that my four or so paragraph post is of an appropriate length for discussing a complicated subject. Perhaps introspection and personal history are not things you want to discuss? I didn't want to go too far into that, but I thought it was an interesting and relevant subject. In any case, I am kind of wondering how you got this: quote:you think alternative media is generally worse and less credible than mainstream media. Out of this: quote:I had been introduced to different forms and viewpoints in the media, and had already realized that some of those viewpoints were also suspect. Specifically, the viewpoints that I was thinking of as lacking credibility were right-wing or libertarian viewpoints, and not magazines like Z Magazine. I don't consider magazines like Z Magazine, or The New Republic, or The Nation, or Mother Jones, to be non-mainstream, really. They are mainstream magazines with a certain political viewpoint. I also don't consider arts or city weeklies to be non-mainstream. When I was talking about non-mainstream, I was more talking about things along the lines of zines talking about how Aspartame causes AIDS, or Lyndon LaRouche explaining how Kepler's mathematics of planetary motion mean that the United States should be a federalist, fusion-based society.
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Mar 20, 2019 22:01
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