It’s fascinating to me how the explosion of Media and the erasure of conventional boundaries is impacting culture. For a start, it’s easier to find examples of bad parts of culture – racist jokes are more obvious because they reach a wider audience. The use of the term ‘fractal’ almost bothers me – a fractal has infinite edges, limited boundaries. That description becomes more apt when you realise this means that every single audience, when you scale downwards, gets more and moer specific until you wind up with people who’d rather if the newsreader was wearing paler colours today.
What’s weird is that despite the way media is flowing from place to place and creating a large, chaotic mass of indistinct spectra, so often, Media is about teasing out a simple, black-and-white narrative, which create oppositional black-and-white narrative. In the increasingly procorporate US Media, this gives us things like horse-race elections and all-or-nothing Zimmerman trials.
The back-and-forth flow of information brings to mind information disparity. I remember footage of people holding their hands high and chanting in a CNN news report during the Kosovo crisis in my teenage years. What I didn’t know until years later was that triumphant chanting – which featured the word ‘CNN’ in it – was actually a common, deliberately controversial Serbian curse: “Da bog da ti kuca bila na CNN-U,” or “I hope I see your house on CNN,” or, more crudely, “I hope NATO bombs your house.” Without the context of what was being said, the image was of Serbians chanting what almost seemed like support, full of energy. When you recognise what that chant means – not just literally but idiomatically – it transforms the scene into an ugly reminder of conflict.
It’s strange to watch in action, but we might genuinely be moving to a point where news is not pro-government or anti-government but is generally pro-corporate. Right now, movies and media already depict a few key cities (New York, Hong Kong, Singapore) as being vibrant and informed, and the rest of the world as … not. Is the limit of infrastructure enough to prevent this? Should it be prevented? Is it just the same old bosses? Latin America is a blossoming economy and an important player on the consumption markets of the global stage – but the natural image in most non-Latin media is of vast fields of rolling green and dirty streets with dancers and street performers. You could find the same things in the United States, but that image does not define that nation. Is it just that the Latin Americas don’t have one of these ‘Media Cities’ to yell on their behalf? Is it inevitable that a region representing almost a billion consumers with two common languages develops a Media capital? Or is it there already, and just too quiet to be heard over the shouting of its economically-massive American neighbours?
All in all, it seems audiences build audiences. Much as with economic growth, these systems feed themselves, blossom and grow, exploding over time. It takes a lot to kill a media capital – even disarray in Hong Kong hasn’t stopped it. A competitor has to replace it… and therefore, the Media flow between Taipei and Singapore is a fascinating dance to watch.
There are too many ideas here to pin to one blog post. What I can say for now is:
- Media capital status can be won and lost
- Media capitals are transnational,
- Media capitals are influenced by economic factors more than raw population
- Media capitals can subsequently create pools of creative potential.
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