Big Media vs. New Media

Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis wonders about the YouTube videos of American soldiers being attacked and killed in Iraq. "If they were seen here," he writes "I’m also not sure what the reaction would be. Some would use them to bolster arguments to get out. Others would use them as arguments to fight harder and get these fuckers."

The fact is that big media fails to deliver the whole story, just bits and pieces of information that they want us to see, the stuff that makes a good, marketable story around which they can sell advertising. The fact that American soldiers are being attacked and killed in Iraq doesn’t sell corn flakes. Instead, big media gives us the story that they think we want to hear.

With YouTube, we get chunks of information without context. We are free to sample from a large quantity of unsorted data, grabbing a handful of disparate puzzle pieces and attempting to put them together ourselves. While with YouTube might be able to see stuff that big media doesn’t show us, this disected process can only leave us with our imagination to fill in the information gaps, to organize these bits and bytes into a coherent story, a kind of ad hoc newsroom of the mind.

What Jeff doesn’t seem to talk about on BuzzMachine (over the months I’ve been reading) is how both new and old media are unreliable sources of information, that both the real and the virtual newsroom are not lenses, but filters that either intentionally hold back information to craft a coherent story, or atomize the information that we need to construct a semblance of truth.

Because human beings have a hard time dealing with such ambiguity, the only logical future for new media is that it will be subsumed by the old. The media will use its new forms to conform to old media’s storytelling tropes, filtering the real world into digestable stories, narratives, and good vs. evil morality plays. New technology will eventually be grabbed by corporate behemoths who will use their deep pockets to harness its potential and use it to tell their hackneyed, marketable stories...and sell us corn flakes.