massless among the masses

In an article called “The Massless Media” (in the January/February issue of The Atlantic ), William Powers argues that what was once indeed “mass” media has slowly been eroded and supplanted by the fragmented “tribalization” evidenced nowadays in the plethora of independent cable channels and “idiosyncratic Web sites” endlessly at our disposal. In this post-mass-media era, he says:

The cultural sameness and conformity that prevailed after WWII – the era of Father Knows Best and Betty Crocker – have been replaced by a popular pursuit of difference and self-expression. In explaining why McDonald’s has shifted a significant portion of its advertising into niches, an executive of the company told BusinessWeek, “From the consumer point of view, we’ve had to change from ‘I want to be normal’ to ‘I want to be special.’” In a mass-media world it’s hard to be special. But in the land of niches it’s easy. What is blogging if not a celebration of the self?

At first, Powers implicitly scorns blogs (like ours) whose readers number in the double and triple digits, as being nothing more than the “ghostly double” of the like-minded people that seek them out in the first place (the ultimate consequence of which being a decline in diverse discourse and social cohesion), but finally he champions our return to the divisive, opinionated, and most importantly, aware political climate of the pre-TV era, when there existed a “wild, cacophonous, emphatically decentralized media culture that mirrored society itself.”

Our self-portrait is not always pretty, and our niche is nebulous, but what’s one more mirror added to the funhouse maze? Sometimes it makes you look fat, but look again. There’s another one to make you look thin.