Media influence in global aspects
Part One: Political
Think time:
Should I publish this post or hold back. I have no participation from the public so it could be harmless to publish, right?
While I'm writing these pages I have to constantly re-negotiate the position of the individual against that of the state. In this matter, I have to be reminded often, that I'm wading into deeper waters than that of an economic discussion.
Whichever way I look at it, these factors are having serious impact on economies.
Write time:
My narrative is aimed at disclosing detail which will impact positively on the economy of the world. There is a lot of controversy, at this point in time, about the interference of media of all kinds, on all aspects of society.
I will table my ideas, which has no formulation or inclination, to direct, judge, or conclude an end result.
I will be unbiased and will not issue an opinion. From an economic position we will put all the facts and conspiracies to a discussion test, without pointing fingers, yet, put the house in order theoretically, hoping that the result will lean toward favorite outcomes.
The first question we have to ask, before discussing media in its own right, is the rights of the players, who profit or lose most, from the media exposure.
The individual and the state seems to be the most prominent in this question.
Which is more important, individual or state, or are they equal? And why do we have to ask these questions?
In reality the State and it's sanctity, should have the highest priority.
Why?
Well, we select our parliament on the basis of one man one vote, in the Western and/or mainly Capitalist world, mostly.
Socialist and Communist regimes have other rules, often more strict. To protect their status they manipulate the rights of the individual to make sure the state can function without interference.
By virtue of that fact and the mandate of Capitalist governments, to govern, we always assume, that they are governing on the basis of a constitution or historical common law migration. The latter is the case in the UK which does not have a written constitution.
This is a legislative process which allows the government to use any means necessary to act against aggression, dissent and a very wide range of issues, on behalf of and on instruction from the majority of individuals who mandated them. The written constitution then plays a huge role in securing the rights of minorities, under an act of Human Rights.
The question is of course to ask, can the two entities exist in harmony or a type of flux condition which suits both parties? This means that even though the laws are constructed in a rigid way, to be fair to any challenge, it must have a certain leeway, to give slack in cases where needed. If all instances or acts were in accordance with the legislative process and in line with the ambiguous lifestyle permitted by this act, the balance of power between State and individual will be in an equilibrium condition. I subscribe to the title "Fair and Reasonable"
What is the restrictions which will lead to a breakdown of equilibrium and create an unbalanced vehicle?
We can look at this as a tug of war. While all parties are "FAIR AND REASONABLE" and respect and trust can be upheld, the line should not move either way. When the power of one of the two parties are increased or diminished, the balance is in a stress condition, until it can be restored. Why could this balance be in stress? Let us view all or some of the possible issues which can undo the balance of power.
At this time, November 2019, the individual has become very strong in numbers, using social media grouping platforms. They can get attention within minutes, from this media. From this platform the state would have to go to a war condition, with its own electorate, to exercise it's mandate. The state in this case is considered a single entity or individual and cannot swamp the media with more than one voice at a time. While this limits the voice of the state the individual can rouse ten million voices against this one entity called "The State" and swamp any defense as if one man one vote secures a majority against the state.
Every person, who opens his or her mouth, seem to be gored by somebody opposing their contribution, or nullify their voice and opinion. It makes no difference what the arguments are, there is an awful lot of disagreement and most of it has a huge emotional ingredient/content. The "for" and "against" on any point whatsoever, is roughly split down the middle, in many/most cases, because of media interference.
The main media Channels are mostly owned by a few big corporations, who are not interested in any person's view point. They bait everybody to be able to wedge their own narrative to the foreground. In other words, talk shows and news channels are all used, or could possibly be used, as a propaganda platform. These platforms could be financed by somebody who has an alternate agenda, which could destabilize the power of the state. In some bizarre circumstances the state will indirectly own the media, to use it as a means to indoctrinate their voters. Communist countries do this often. It is part of the Socialist fabric.
The individual are in such a good position today, globally, where everybody claims the right of free speech, and which is granted. The private individual has his cake and eating it with whipped cream and cherries. Yet, we require our governments to perform with maximum efficiency, which they cannot do when citizens are criticizing them all the time. We are claiming that our elected officials are not doing what we voted them into government for, but we do nothing to replace them. Neither do we hold them accountable. In the worst case scenario the state uses its powers, with support from the police and military sector, to suppress uprising or dissent, as we are seeing in France and Hong Kong, right now.
In such a scenario the status between State and individual has reached volatile peaks of distrust and disrespect. This in turn will turn the state into a villain who discard the voice of the individual so as to secure the integrity of its manifest.
On par with this luxury of free speech we have inherited a very useful tool to create mass hysteria. The internet has opened up to give free speech, unchallenged leverage. You can use one of many tools to get your message of love or hate across, before the state even has the time to discuss the inherent implications. The state has no chance, in many of these cases, to review its point of interest. They have no time to appoint council in defense and secure a proper rebuttal on or about the argument. So most often they act on impulse, when an media attack takes place and this creates damage to their reputation before any defensive mechanism can be established or be discussed.
In effect, this is the core of the problem. One individual can lose his reputation and many can join in the rampage, by posting just one argument, but a government cannot afford to do the same, to garner conciliatory defensive action. This effect in reality means that the government can receive a million grenades in its office while only one or a few disgruntled individuals can soak up many grenades without an impact.
Governments across the world are all feeling the brunt of this mismanaged status and it will/might/could soon run into a "turn over" tactic.
There are governments across the world who will allow this behavior only until the state lose control or seem to lose it. At that point the unpredictable could happen and sometimes the predictable does. This happened recently in Venezuela, when the government had to defend itself against a self proclaimed president, who in essence. is a nobody.
In this, we can see the present mantle of Hong Kong turning tables. While the Chinese has accepted some liability in the transfer of Hong Kong, the area now belongs to China and will be administered by it. Within this cusp we seem to forget the incidents in Tienanmen square in Beijing. Hong Kong will/could/may become the mirror of that event. The only reason why China is not making war with the Hong Kong locals are that they, China's banks and Communist party officials, are laundering huge sums of Asian Currencies into the Dollar bank system, for own benefit.
Why are the forces which requires equal trust and respect, both from government and individual, so important?
That event of right's being eroded, will become the turning point for many protests globally. Governments will toughen up and we could see escalation of tensions, where the individual will/might/could lose his grip on his sovereign rights. This and the coming season of poverty, water scarcity, food price manipulation, monetary collapse, will all tie in with the rise and fall of the age of modern surveillance techniques and curtailment of the social media platforms. For our world to be safe, this has to happen. It has been proven over and over that there is no cohesion in a group ticket, when there are hundreds of managers and one laborer or lawlessness cloaked under the mantel of freedom of speech.
In the analysis it seems that the individual has secured too much leverage in the relationship with its government. The consequential damage is that governments will be forced to abandon the unwritten truce pact, of a level playing field and return to a type master and servant relationship. No government in the world will ever be able to function while the media and individual rights have the upper hand.
Is our world then unsafe right now?
My personal opinion:
In all my life, which is from after world war two, I have never seen this world more dangerously tilted toward destruction of life, any type of life, as we know it. In an opposing argument I have neither ever seen so many issues being tilted toward resonance of a cause, to sustain life, being guarded so strongly by emotions.
In the next post I will discuss population growth and how this manifest with available resources. This topic has an immediate influence on all structures of life yielding dynamics. It has a direct tie to the influence of media in all it's forms. To coin a phrase, we are used to this one: The pen is mightier than the sword. Well, to me; "One word voiced on social media is more powerful than any declaration of war ever written by the pen".
We have now looked at the discussion from a distance, watching the ornamental image being turned to various angles of perception, so that we can distinguish the light from darkness. Let us then look at the Media and how it is delivering the programs, including the news bulletins.
The following part of this memorandum hinges on selective references. If you think that you have read enough on internet about the issue on the subject, please skip the yellow section following this paragraph. this part is about the origins of radio and the technological track of advance that followed to this point. The point made here is that the information era has it's advantages as well as disadvantages.
However, the result of this scientific wonder is that the individual became stronger all the time while the government did gain in the past until the individual learned that he could usurp power from the government, without force.
The media began as a radio which could only host talk shows. We could hear stories being told and everything was about sound. The radio broadcasting of music and talk intended to reach a dispersed audience started experimentally around 1905-1906, and commercially around 1920 to 1923. VHF (very high frequency) stations started 30 to 35 years later.
At this time only one sensor of the human body was and could be manipulated. There were thousand of programs and although most were used for either education, fun, spiritual, news, community involvement, entertainment, etc., many were tuned, by respective governments, to be setting a course for cultural development, in a way that pleased the State. The State always had a hand in the evolution of the public broadcasters and as such, used these facilities to further its own bias. Every country in the world has a public broadcasting division or more, which has the authority to provide programs to the masses, to appease the voters and provide a public service. It is a well known fact that Communist and Socialist countries have a very narrow band of disbursement of its intellectual matter. In short the message is that the public should only hear what the State wishes it to do.
We must admit that this medium had a very limited focus on the individual. The individual could multi task while listening to the radio so that much of the conversation could be missed if the attention was drawn to other duties.
The number of television sets in use rose from 6,000 in 1946 to some 12 million by 1951. No new invention entered American homes faster than black and white television sets; by 1955 half of all U.S. homes had one
June 2, 1953 – the coronation of Her Majesty Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom was the first to be televised live on British television. July 23, 1962 – the first live transatlantic television broadcast via the Telstar I satellite.
From these references we can see that Television was part of the household since the 1950's.
As reference I quote from the Oxford Books about the power of broadcasting in the political sphere and how it will or should/could behave in the future.
"Major Research Findings
An important question stemming from these trends asks what these shifts in the media landscape mean for politics and for political communication theory? As it turns out, there is considerable research to help answer this question, but it is not without controversy. Two major areas of scholarship pertaining to the first part of this question are whether narrow casting leads to greater audience selective exposure, and whether selective exposure will foster political polarization that serves to undermine democracy. Another area of scholarship addresses the second part of the question by examining whether new forms of media content (e.g., niche news) and patterns of their consumption necessitate entirely new theorizing and expectations about media effects on political outcomes."
and
"Conclusion
This chapter posed the question of whether mass media will continue to endure in an environment of vast choice and increased audience control over both media content production and its reception. Implications of the shift from broadcasting to narrow casting, and to hyper personalization of content, invite political communication scholars to re-examine long-held theoretical assumptions about whether, where, and how media effects are likely to occur and to devise new methods to study them. While the chapter made clear that mass media will likely endure, it also raised new questions that will have to be addressed as scholars strive to understand the nature and effects of mass communication in the future."
It is not my intention to find in favor or against this narrative. It is however essential to derive from such titles the track which demands our full attention and participation, in learning how this medium will influence the mind of those producing goods and services and those buying those products, or for that matter, the economic outcomes of Nations. How will the psych of the human, behave in lieu of the bombardment of information which it has to dissect.
In the WIKI : "Social aspects of television" the following is written and I quote:
"The social aspects of television are influences this medium has had on society since its inception. The belief that this impact has been dramatic has been largely unchallenged in media theory since its inception. However, there is much dispute as to what those effects are, how serious the ramifications are and if these effects are more or less evolutionary with human communication"
In the article, "The Relationship between Traditional Mass Media and Social Media”: Reality Television as a Model for Social Network Site Behavior, written for Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, we get to hear about reality TV and mass media/mass audiences. In this script the writer does a very extensive analysis of these two norms and how it contributes to the total picture of media use.
In this article, look very carefully at this sentence: "Viewers are operationalized as active processors of television content who learn and model behavior portrayed in television programming"
In the article:"Mass Media and Psychology: The relationship between the human behavior and mass media" we read:
Politics is one of the best examples where mass media and psychology are inter-related. The point made by Krosnick (2001) has demonstrated that the understanding of the voter about the candidate’s personal traits such as leadership, trustworthiness, intelligence are the keys to win a vote in the USA. This fact has been again practically proved from the result of presidential election United States in 2016. Because of that, politicians try to share their personal vision and show their personalities using mass media like television interviews, social media, and websites. This media-psychological integration has made the duties of politicians more difficult and competitive.
In the article
"THE RADIO AND THE TELEVISION IN THE MORAL
EDUCATION OF A CHILD"
I quote:
"Preamble
The radio and the television, audio and visual techniques of
transmitting information, knowledge and education to a wider
audience, are eloquent testimonies of man’s creative potentialities in
recent times. Their power and influence on the contemporary and
globalized human society can not be doubted. The young and the
un-discerning adults are at the mercy of what they hear on radio or
watch/receive through television sets"
This in essence ties up my argument about this subject. From the information shared here it is evident that governments see the media as a envelope of strategy which is in violation to it's destination. Where it used to serve the purpose of governments it now mostly only serve the individual.
On a global platform it makes sense that the media is mainly used as a battering ram to dispose of the governments across the globe. It is also not a secret that governments like the USA and Russia, including others like China, are using this medium to further their own interfering ends in smaller countries.
Whether we will adjust, in society, to respect our governments, even when we disagree with their position, remains to be seen. It may happen that the global positioning against the interference by this medium, could get agitated long before a state of acceptance by both parties concludes. This will have an inevitable course of rebellion by governments against those internet sites which gives audiences world wide a stage to operate from. It will take just one government to consolidate it's powers, to break the bank on this matter. If only one Western nation's government, remove all these rights, in favor of a stable government, the rest will follow suit. That will be the end of Social media as we know it. The question now is, how far are we from that point and what will be the pointers that will serve this purpose.
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