Over the weekend I checked in on the news and saw that a Soros rent-a-mob was causing trouble in Arizona, trying to disrupt a Trump rally. I did not see this on TV. I saw it on Twitter. I then went to Drudge who had some links. I then went to some other sites and then finally back to twitter to see and join in on the snarky commentary. I still have a TV subscription, but it did not occur to me to turn it on for the news.
I am a big sports fan and I will watch just about anything. I used to joke that I would watch ants wrestle if they put it on TV. There was a time when that was true, but as you get older the endless hype and proselytizing in games is tough to take. ESPN has become unwatchable because of it. The solution for me is I follow games on-line via various score sites and, of course, twitter. Once the game gets to crunch time I can watch it, often on-line.
The NCAA tournament is a great example. I used to love watching this thing and I still do, but I do not watch it like I once did. Instead, I have it on-line so I can keep tabs on the games and jump to the one that is going to have a tight finish. That way I skip all the nonsense hype and I can do other things while tracking the games. Again, part of it is age, but the bigger part is technology. I can now easily filter out the proselytizing and hype so I do.
In the political realm, I have not watched the Sunday chat shows in so long I no longer know their names or the performers they have playing the various roles. The evening shout shows are just about unknown to me now. I can consume all the political news I need on-line from sources that are more intelligent and interesting than anything conventional media has to offer.
There is one other little thing to ponder before I get to the point. I have a vast music collection. Much of it came from the days when Columbia House would send you ten CD’s just because you filled out a card and gave them a fake name. Another big chunk came when “sharing” music got hot in the 90’s. I have also bought a lot of music too. I still do through Amazon, but as individual mp3’s, not physical disks.
I am a Pandora user so when I hear a song I like, I will add it to my list and either buy it from Amazon or rip it from YouTube. I prefer to buy it, but if it means buying a whole CD then I steal it like a normal person. The only exception is classical or maybe some old blues where you want the digitally mastered quality, but otherwise I buy songs, not bundles of songs. I do not want or need the extra. If it adds no value, I do not buy it. Music has become commodified.
The music industry was collapsed by the mp3 and gnutella. Suddenly, the layers and layers of expense around the single song could be stripped away, unless it brought value. Most of it did not so it was slowly sloughed off. It did not happen without a fight, but it eventually happened. Performers are back making money performing and the music business is much smaller. The songs are now the marketing expense for the live shows in many cases.
We are seeing something similar with the news media. A 40 minute podcast from John Derbyshire can be consumed anytime and anywhere. John is a super smart guy with a real talent for podcasting. He works out of a tree-house. Anthony Cumia is running a radio network from his basement now. Adam Corolla is a millionaire from podcasting. A lot of what is on new media is crap, but the best parts are vastly better than anything offered by traditional media. Most important, they are cheaper.
That is the thing. The cost of reaching each customer is collapsing, which in turn is dropping the barrier to entry. Fox News exists because it can tax you through your cable bill. Cord cutting and ad hoc, on-demand video is the response to that, which drives up their cost of reaching each customer. On the other hand, a guy like Mike Cernovich can quickly raise money for a media project, because his costs are collapsing.
This brings me to Donald Trump. He posted something on twitter over the weekend about Obama’s trip to Cuba. Every news personality retweeted it and it probably reached ten million people in an hour. Donald Trump has 7.1 million twitter followers. The echo effect means he can reach tens of millions of people from his phone, blowing past the media industrial complex. In fact, he has enslaved them with twitter, turning them into his PR firm.
In some respects, Trump is the Napster candidate. He may not win, but he is blowing a hole in the system. The layers of barnacles on the news industry are a lot like the layers of waste in the music business. Technology is going to force a scraping off of these barnacles for the underlying entity to survive in the new mass media age. If you are one of these barnacles. Trumpster is Satan, just as Napster was the great evil of the music business. But when it comes to technology, the news always displaces the old.
I knew Cernovich would get a mention in here sooner or later. Get used to his name and funny lisp, he is only getting bigger. I had to laugh at the Fake indian’s Twitter tirade over the weekend. She seems like a silly old woman who has just discovered smart phone technology and is going wild. She is an old-school politician and this is clear to all and sundry. It was cringe-worthy to see her try Trump’s tricks, like a comedian getting caught stealing jokes. In the comment sections, she was destroyed. Her day is gone, time to retire to… Read more »
Nothing better than being lectured on diversity by an old white woman, standing on the steps of her mansion, while she defrauds people as a fake Indian. You can’t make this stuff up.
As far as Cernovich, I stumbled over him on twitter. He either followed me or someone I follow. I see his tweets all the time now so he is new to me.
My husband loves CBS, so John Dickerson on one show and Chuck Todd on the other. Dickerson is decent. I know he’s in the tank for the Dems, but he manages to act like a journalist. Chuck Todd simply won’t shut up. He asks a question and then starts interrupting. I’m sure he thinks we’d much rather listen to him. The way the media slants news is so obvious. The problem is that people can’t make the effort to check things out. I had someone on Facebook quote the Democratic talking point “Trump would have made more money if he’d… Read more »
In the tank for Dems? Is that “the left”, foreign interests, or Progressives?
Certainly not the namesake “democracy”
Yes, Todd went to the Chris Mathews school of jurno-list ism when he realized that the revolving door
had no other way to parlay dedication to the (currently figureheaded) Obama machine into “the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed”.
In My Humble Opinion of course.
Complementary article here: https://medium.com/life-learning/american-spring-d6a8320bf712#.mmgx6be30
See, now that’s what I call “political science”, without the traditional rent-seeker “economist” tassels dangling from the shoes, or nipples.
Nothing that hasn’t been covered since Aesop’s Fables and Brothers Grimm mind you, but crisp none the less.
Trump, and to a lesser extent Sanders, are a genuinely new thing in American politics. Yeah yeah, I know, Sanders just reheated Eugene V. Debs’s first platform and Trump has no idea what his own positions are, but I’m talking about their grasp of the new reality. From Jackson forward, plutocrats didn’t have the skill or inclination to hit the campaign trail, so they hired people who did. But now there’s hardly any “campaign trail” at all. Plutocrats will be forced to run directly — Soros is too old, but “Zuckerberg / some token chick from Salon or whatever” looks… Read more »
Some political scientists, an absurd phrase, argue that we are in the Sixth Party System. Others say this current period is the natural evolution of the Fifth Party System. A better way of thinking about it is the diminishing returns. The first media age was radio that ran from the start of the 20th through WW2. The second media age has been television. Enormous amounts of money have been directed into maximizing the value of television to sell product, polices and political candidates. We probably blew past the point of diminishing returns in the 90’s and maybe even the 80’s.… Read more »
“his style is a bad fit for mass media.” That’s exactly it. Make all the Hector Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho jokes you like — and lord knows I’ve made my share — but Twitter reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. We’re in a thoroughly demotic age — Cruz seems like a sharp dude, and he’d clean up on the Mugwump ticket, but that’s not the world we live in.
Cruz has an honesty problem. Mass media exaggerates the people we see so Cruz often sounds like a super villain, because he does not respect his audience enough to lie to them on their terms. Instead, he has that stupid smirk on his face. It looks like mockery. Trump signals that he respects his audience. People will go along with a lot if they think they are being respected.
Cruz is a planner and detail man with, I assume, a planner’s vision. Who knows? He lacks boldness and brevity, which Trump does not. The juxtaposition of Trump on Cruz left Cruz looking even more officious than before. You cannot lead people by instructing them.
Cruz needs to lighten up. He’s way too serious, which speaks to me of self-importance and ego, very bad traits for any human being. Whether he’s a liar or not doesn’t matter to me. All politicians lie. It’s allowed under the Politician’s Code, as long as it advances their career. The rough equivalent in Shia Islam is taqiyya.
I keep waiting for Trump to pull out an M4 and squeeze off a few rounds into the rafters at a rally.
You be dissin’ da man by sayin’ his name wrong…it’s Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho…show some respeck.
Ow, my balls!! I stand corrected.