As IF Times

It’s interesting how far the world of mass media consumption has come.  Only a hundred years ago, if you wanted to be entertained, you had to dress up and go to the town theater to watch some kind of performance, typically including some singing, dancing and maybe some vaudevillian theater.   Then, radio came along and although it wasn’t the same visual experience as theater, you could listen to stories in the comfort of your living room, or parlor as it was probably known in those days.  This was a marvelous technical invention as it allowed listeners to create scenes in their own minds drawn from the sketches of audio only broadcasts.  The apex of influence of this medium was probably HG Well’s 1938 broadcast of The War Of The Worlds when people were led to believe that a Martian attack was under way.

But when Television came along after WW2, entertainment made another great leap forward.  No longer did people have to suffice with just audio, or with silent films at the movie theater, you could have voice and video in your own home.  However, the technology was still ahead of the content and despite classic pioneering shows including Milton Berle and Lucille Ball, most of the early offerings were rather banal.  Why? Well apparently most talented writers were working on real entertainment; Broadway plays and motion pictures.

But as in all things, the ability to make money from this new medium spawned an explosion in the amount and quality of content available on the small screen in the years to come.  Thus advertisers willing to pay to hawk their goods drew people into the business of putting out popular content.  During this time, the output of content fell to 3 major broadcasters who had a monopoly on all kinds of entertainment including news and sports.

This was pretty much the model for another 30 years until a guy named Ted Turner decided that audiences were willing to accept partitioned and specialized entertainment, thus heralding cable channels with narrow, specific fields of interest.  This shrunk the audience and influence of the big 3 networks.  To this day, you can still find a midget basket weaving channel or similar on your two hundred channel cable guide.  The next evolution was streaming.  This is essentially the same as cable channels except that you pay extra for ‘premium content’.  It’s like Only Fans, but non pornographic.  This caters to people who want to control their entertainment and on their schedules. It also contributed to the phenomenon of binge watching.

But the real 800 pound gorilla of entertainment today is Social media:  Instagram posts, Tik-Tok videos.  To the degree that most everyone on earth is able to have access to a mobile phone, they are also all consumers of Instagram or Tik Tok videos.  These are the platforms of our time. They are comprised of very short clips on any given topic.  For good or bad, these platforms truly shrink the expanse of the planet. Unlike the history of entertainment which has always been in the hands of the few, now EVERYONE is a content creator and the audience is truly vast.  Unlike all other avenues of entertainment, there are no boundaries for content, nor for that matter, taste. But these are not purely artistic and expressive works; these short videos are all now made with commercial intent.  As some may know, there are entire ‘farms’ in China which produce only short social media content for commercial use.

As with TV a couple of generations ago, everyone is looking for a way to capitalize on people’s appetite for amusement. Grand oeuvres won’t be found here, but you will find mostly themes of humor or prurience. And it’s lucrative. If somehow you are able to catch lightning in a bottle and acquire millions of view, you would be an internet sensation and all these views translates into real cash.  These ‘influencers’ make thousands or hundreds of thousands depending on the volume of clicks. They will benefit from affiliate marketing and branding.  Some of the top influencers are Cristiana Ronaldo and of course the Kardashians.   But even below that tier, many content makers can make very comfortable livings by simply putting out banal things and often simply following established formulas for content.  Who hasn’t scrolled through cute animal videos or food recipes?

Interestingly, the audience and sweet spot for marketing is and always has been to teenagers, both boys and girls as indicated by the people with the largest audiences.  But it’s also a powerful marketing tool for the entire spectrum of ages and there are probably no businesses today that don’t have a social media presence. Thus influential media has moved away from the gatekeepers of the past.  Now, anyone with a phone can influence the minds of millions as if they were stars. This is a great egalitarian platform.  So instead of professionals, people are essentially entertaining themselves!  But while this platform can reveal great minds when they otherwise would never have had the opportunity, something tells me it’s more like water…which always finds its lowest level.

This piece is inspired by a podcast to which I subscribe, entitled; Inner French.  The topic was the extent to which people have become unwittingly enslaved by the many electronic devices available in modern society. Specifically, this podcaster, Hugo Cotton, discusses the degree to which his daily activities became obsessively tied to the tabulations put out by his exercise watch.

While ostensibly, the watch was just an appendage to show time and distance travelled on his jogging runs, the other aspects of his life also monitored by the watch began to create a need in his mind to attain prescribed targets of things such as sleep duration and quality. In essence, he realized that this obsession with reaching targets prescribed by the watch were having adverse effects on his life and thus, he stopped wearing it except for the jogging runs.

I found this to be an interesting observation as this phenomenon has enslaved an entire world by linking their lives to electronic devices.  Of course, we’re not talking about basic smartphones per se; everyone in the world has one and that device is indelibly linked to each person’s lives and personality.  But phones are not just about basic communication as we all know.

What is more troubling is that people have fallen into the trance conveyed primarily by their phones on how to live their lives in general.

In the not too distant past, if people saw something on television or read something in a newspaper, it was deemed to be true, thus those platforms had enormous impact on people.  Clearly those who controlled those outlets would have significant leverage on any given society.  Cellphones, or more specifically, apps on smartphones have mostly taken over the role of TV and newspapers.  Instagram and Facebook are the modern equivalent of unimpeachable sources.

For some reason, there are endless tips and sage advice on how to ‘better’ one’s life or to more effectively perform some mundane task such as frying an egg or tying a shoe. Apparently we’ve been doing it wrong for centuries. There are targets given for physical competence, for cognitive ability or for raising your dogs and children.  We are given advice on the best foods to eat, at what time of the day to eat them, the subtleties of olive oil and the best things to buy at Costco.

We are measured against some mythical statistics on longevity and are given advice on how to attain such immortality by consuming the right amount of kale or by walking 8000 steps per day and drinking organic coconut water. Often this advice is given by 20 something year old ‘influencers’ with acne who’ve just graduated from high school (or not).  Not only that, but apps are always available to measure the targets of such an idealized life. As noted in Hugh Cotton’s experience, people fuss over reaching statistical targets arbitrarily set by ‘experts’.

And people believe it.  They believe the advice on how to get wealthy simply by leveraging themselves in real estate or to put it all into Crypto currencies. People become stressed when they compare the ‘progress’ in their lives versus those depicted on social media platforms. It is never good enough. Invariably, people will find famous people who will espouse sentiments favorable to their own and thus the modern phenomenon of ‘following’ people becomes the norm. Admit it or not, the phenomenon of hanging on to every word of powerful influencers is as additive as any drug.

With great irony, the proliferation of ‘information’ on so many levels creates more stress in people than the liberating health benefits that these devices purport to provide.  There are unrealistic expectations created to which people cannot achieve, thus fostering people’s natural insecurities. Think of the business model of Peloton, the stationary virtual bike machine in which you are on a leaderboard against other cyclists.   Think ab0ut Duolingo, a language learning app in which you are on a leaderboard with other learners.  While it can be argued that these are just effective tools,  in practice, people can become handcuffed to their own unrealistic expectations and perceived inadequacies and in fact may bring out obsessive behaviors.   By their own hand, people have increasingly and unknowingly chained themselves to their electronic devices.

It’s worthwhile to remember that not all ‘statistically’ derived advice is valid. Some of us will remember that in the 1960’s, 4 out of 5 doctors recommended a certain brand of cigarette. And we must not forget the famous phrase attributed to Mark Twain: “…there are lies, damned lies and statistics…”