The New York Times recently described Mark Zuckerberg as «the #Rupert Murdoch# of his generation». The statement came as a reaction to the Facebook CEO’s refusal to take action against #Donald Trump# tweets interpreted as inciting violence against those protesting the death of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer. Racism and police brutality should not exist in the 21st century in the first place and together with the new #media ecology#, show that the world of today is a truly strange territory, so readings that make it more comprehensible are a great relief. The book Media: Why It Matters is such a reading – its subtitle indicating it as part of the Polity Press’s «Why it Matters» series and, of course, should not be taken as triviliasing the Black Lives Matter movement.
If the parallel between Zuckerberg and Murdoch surprised you, you need not worry. Nick Couldry, Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics, just published a book that will help you understand the comparison. Building on the continuity between the worlds of mass and #social media#, he clearly shows why current problems are structurally different from those of the past, and what the true challenges for the future are.
Tipping point
The first episode of Mr. Robot, the techno-thriller TV series about the hidden mechanisms of the digital world, is introduced by a flashback where we see Elliot Alderson (as played by Rami Malek) visiting a restaurant owner who is a disguised child pornographer. Elliot, a young programmer who works as a cyber-security engineer by day and a vigilante hacker by night, has hacked the child pornographer’s computer and engineered his arrest by sending its illegal content to the police. The episode was first aired in 2015 and I still remember the gratifying feeling of seeing the justice being done – a feeling that was no doubt one of the reasons for the series’ success. It corresponded perfectly to the belief of the generations who grew up with the 1990s internet culture, who were convinced that with the help of digital media and technologies a better and just world can be built. But the narration of the series was far from being unambiguously optimistic. Seen from today, Mr. Robot most probably marks the moment when social media had reached a point where its disadvantages largely outweighed its advantages.
the world of today is a truly strange territory
Mr. Robot was a cult TV series and even if warnings of the new hidden world of digital media were part of its thoroughly ambiguous message, it was not part of the general perception of media. Neither the general public nor governmental regulative bodies were ready for the changes in the making. Two events, the victory of President Trump and the UK’s decision to exit the EU, brought about radical changes, and the world we live in now is a different one. However, the fact that part of this novelty is the obscure digital media architecture that enabled these two events in the first place is still not largely known.
Besides the optimism fed into narratives about how online ‘connection’ would transform the world and our possibilities for freedom, Couldry simply explains that there is another way of telling media history. Media, rather than underwriting freedom, provides opportunities for governments looking to establish and entrench their power. For centuries, in countries of the global North at least, people believed that free media institutions and the social life that underpins a free press, are sufficient conditions for broader freedom and democratic citizenship. However, the extraordinary expansion of social connectedness through social media has created new opportunities for states and corporations to govern societies in a deeper, more intimate, and less accountable way.
Algorithms
Media are, according to Couldry, infrastructures of connection. They connect us, they represent the world for us, and they also produce films, series, songs, and games. In these products, they imagine the world differently for us and we gain new understandings of what the world means and how it works. Our participation in today’s media enables large forces such as corporations and governments to reimagine the social world in their interests. In the background of media products, in ways that are largely hidden from media users, a new form of imagination goes on, the power of algorithms. There are several excellent studies of #algorithms, but Couldry’s interpretation is one of the most far-reaching. Algorithms are automated procedures, driven by computer software, for counting and aggregating data. When we go online via a computing device, data is gathered about what we do on that device, many items get counted and compared with preset expectations. This data processing is now basic to how media operates and, claims Couldry, such tracking and processing are becoming the means to new understandings of the social world. A new language of social description is developing, about the things that corporate computer programs can count, and the patterns that emerge from processing those numbers. The social world itself is being reimagined – through data.
Our participation in today’s media enables large forces such as corporations and governments to reimagine the social world in their interests.
«Once,» writes Couldry, «the imaginative power of media – for example, the nineteenth-century novel – was used to reduce the opacity of the social world: to make its vast complexity more manageable by uncovering patterns. But today the newly unleashed imaginative power of algorithmic processes, working deep within business, is increasing the social world’s opacity, at least to the human beings on the receiving end of algorithmic decision making.» (page 79)
A book for everyone
The great advantage of this short but important book is the ease with which it makes us perceive unity among what we are used to viewing as completely different and separated worlds. That is the world of Murdoch on the one hand, and the world of Zuckerberg on the other. Couldry wrote the book for everyone. Everybody, I am sure, will appreciate it. What I particularly appreciate is that to explain how these two worlds together form one, human, social world, he applied the key concepts developed by the best traditional media scholars – Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams – showing that he too is one of them.
