"You can do better cable news or worse cable news, but you are always doing cable news."
It is an abdication of responsibility for technologists to pretend that the technologies they make have no say in who we become. |
 | | A composite of photos taken at Government Center, Boston, over about an hour in March 2022, showing only people with their phones.Photo Illustration by Pelle Cass |
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I've worked in media my entire adult life. I started my first blog in 2003, when I was 18. Since then, I've been a magazine writer, a magazine editor, a newspaper writer, a newspaper editor, a newsletter writer and a cable news host. I launched Vox, the explanatory news site, and that gave me license to mess about in a dizzying array of mediums: I executive produced a Netflix show and helped run a YouTube channel and edited comics and tried to reimagine the news for Snapchat and hosted or launched a half-dozen podcasts. I've spent countless hours flogging all these projects, not to mention myself, across countless social media platforms. If I know anything, I know media. |
Only, in the past few years, I've come to believe my understanding of media was all wrong. Worse, my understanding was the conventional one. The one on which almost every element of our digital world — and increasingly, of our political and financial and social and emotional worlds — is built. We think we use media. We're taught that we are the masters of our mediums, and that all our choices within them are freely made. |
But as I write in my column this week, there have long been media theorists who knew better: It's the media that uses us. Discovering those theorists, in recent years, has changed my outlook on what I do, who I am, and who I'm becoming. They may do the same for you. |
What Our Readers Are Saying |
As a 53-year-old man, I try not to be an "everything was better then" crank. Frankly, I treasure having instant access to information and being able to reach out to friends across the world. But as a clinical psychologist, I can see the damage that the medium is doing to our collective psyche. While much has been said about television and the internet in general, nothing has been so corrosive to Western liberalism and psychological well-being than social media. On the other hand, I also see young people far more engaged in politics and social advocacy than my generation ever was. I'm not sure how we throw out the bath water while keeping the baby. But I'm glad that we're finally having the conversation. — Ash, Mt. Lebanon, Pa. As a child and even as a young adult, I lived in a totally analog world. My grandchildren live in a totally digital one. Their take on the world is fashioned by that change of reality to the point that they are simply incapable of seeing any other way. At the same time, we live in a nation structured by a virtually unchangeable document written in the late 18th century. It's hard to see how this is viable in the long run … even the medium. I hope to live long enough to see the answer to that enigma. I fear I won't. — David Horn, Moneta, Va. |
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