You Say You Want a Revolution

Capsule:  Where did our 70's yen for social revolution go?  Today's social change is conflated with social media, courtesy of Facebook, YouTube, twitter and MySpace. Yesterday's generation gaps are today's socio-economic gulfs, defined by whether you listen to alternative music on your iPhone, slim down your telephone service to wireless only and pare your broadband down to wireless 3G--with the richest demographic trending more progressive on media and less progressive on politics. Maybe the media was always a poor barometer of cultural evolution.  But today, social change seems pushed into the background in a world of immediate gratification through centralized search, e-books, iTunes, apps and news-filtering aggregators. As predicted, the medium is the message; and, the message is less about art, political and cultural change than about recovering economic dominance.

Revolutionary Media
Revisiting the Day When Internet was Born
NPR on Wikipedia
On the Media




The Hidden Brain


People love the Beatles. Their lyrics seemed right in the '70's and they still seem right today. 

You say you want a revolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world. You tell me that it's evolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world. But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. You say you got a real solution. Well, you know we'd all love to see the plan. You ask me for a contribution. Well, you know we're doing what we can. But when you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. You say you'll change the constitution. Well, you know we all want to change your head. You tell me it's the institution. Well, you know you better free your mind instead. But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right.  (From: "Revolution," initially released in 1968 as the "B" side of "Hey Jude.")

In some ways, the most revolutionary aspect of the Beatles' Revolution lyrics is the fact that we can look them up online today and quote them anywhere--probably not as powerful as what Lennon had in mind.  Today, one of the highest ranking Google choices under "revolutionary media" is a religious site of the same name. 

Media milestones in the '70's included what seemed like confrontational coverage of centralized power and geopolitics. In a rich irony, The New York Times' Pentagon Papers and The Washington Post's Watergate coverage poisoned perceptions of the Vietnam War and helped depose the US President who took us out of it. 

For those who cared to learn what havoc the cold war and colonialism were wreaking in southeast Asia, the Middle East and South and Central America, there were words and images that had never before been shared.   

NPR was born in 1970, beginning its 40+ years of earnest struggle to maintain an attitudinal center.  And, for distraction, widespread sales of color TV's and VCR's offered technicolor entertainment, as did the beginning of today's 500+ TV choices with the birth of cable, including MTV and CNN as the 70's turned into the '80's.

Today's media milestones include: the international coverage of September 11th; the Iraq War and its aftermath in an increasingly unstable Middle East; Hurricane Katrina; 2008's US Presidential campaign; President Obama's inauguration; the passage of national Health Care legislation; and, lots of gut-wrenching news that doesn't seem like news at all, reported in high emotional color by cable networks and bloggers with vague  attachments to the facts and strong affiliations with their employers' bottom lines. 

We may not have news the way we used to yearn to make it, but we have greater content personalization and greatly expanded distribution at a fraction of the cost of old media and, maybe, at a fraction of the social impact.  The evidence of these changes--captured by the global internet and iTunes, as well as Google's entry into and exit from China--seems less revolutionary than powerful in placing cultural choices in alignment with economics.

NPR, having survived a near-death experience in 1983, is still striving to earn its 2005 Harris Poll credential of "America's Most Trusted News Source"--despite the misappropriation of titles like this by popular cable news networks.  WNYC's On the Media carries stories like this past week's nuclear summit, during which President Obama asked the press to leave, just as the discussions began; this year's Pulitzer award to ProPublica, an internet-only news source, reporting on the deaths of purportedly euthanized patients in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and, the publication of Panorama, a 328-page newspaper designed for nostalgic news interests.

On the Media also blows the lid off gender bias--again?--by completing an inventory of NPR news sources and commentators, concluding that the voices invoked most commonly overwhelmingly belong to men.  (Even at NPR?)

On the Media's commenter on this story is a male university professor and blogger who has the guts to say that women still don't stand up for themselves in the marketplace because of a too-substantial fear of what people will think.  His theory: there won't be real media equal rights until women learn not to give a *#$@! (You know the word; I'd say it but I'm afraid of what you might think.)

Brooke Gladstone, On the Media's host, opines that women have learned not to express themselves aggressively, because when we do, we're treated as if we've expelled methane in public.  Can this story really still be in the news 40 years after Gloria Steinem first published Ms. magazine?

Is the culprit an unevolved media or is it The Hidden Brain? Shankar Vedantam's 2010 book hypothesizes that most public thought is the product of a collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious.  On gender bias and racial prejudice, Vedantam theorizes that our earliest cultural associations favor men and caucasians and that this unconscious bias is most likely to defeat conscious thought when we're emotionally weak--fearful, angry, distracted. 

Maybe this explains the lack of a real revolution in today's media images.  Instead, we have a steady stream of angry white men and a few unattractively angry women--at least they seem unattractive to our collective unconscious, according to Vedantam (who, after all, likes an angry Mommy?)--talking about taxpayer revolts, attempts to rewrite the Constitution and our perceived proximity to communist China. 

And this is just the right wing.  The left wing seems delusional in mistaking our common sense in electing an African-American President and Democratic party leader for real revolution, when it seems that today's revolution is all in our heads.