How the Internet Ate Media

Social media flattened the relationship between the elites and everyone else — it gave the public a voice. When JFK would give a speech, he was uncontested. Now, with everyone transitioning from a passive reader to a veritable journalist, every statement is challenged. A journalist, instead of being the sole arbiter of truth, is now just another pe... See more

When the printing press was invented in 1440, we opened up a new era in information distribution. Thoughts and ideas could spread faster than word of mouth in the first form broadcast media — a one to many dynamic.

Before social media, a wide swath of the population was just utterly ignored by traditional print/audio/visual media — they never heard what each other had to think. This was the original filter bubble.

So maybe we shouldn’t lament the end of peak centralization, particularly in media. The idea of there being one telephone company, two superpowers, three television stations, and four internet companies - it’s too homogenous. The fragmentation will lead to new cultures, ways of thinking, new ideas, and ultimately more cultural innovation.

Everything used to be fractured and fragmented by definition. Then came the telegraph, then the telephone, and mass manufacturing, public education and more. We’re now returning to that early way of living before Peak Centralization. Structurally, we have more in common with the 1800s than we did with 1950s.

Put simply, what the explosion of truth did was expose the superficiality of existing media institutions, create a "public" that could challenge the elites directly and create platforms for individuals to effectively become legible institutions and develop one to many relationships.

One argument is that pre-internet, journalists had a more reliable source of revenue, enabling them to do more investigative work, and the business model shift to online advertising meant they'd now have to produce popular pieces more frequently.