The Ages of Media
latest revision
A while back down the Yellow Brick Road I developed my Three Ages of Communication:
Age of Parchment
Age of Printing Press
Age of Free For All
Then I read a piece by Martin Gurri and smartened it up a bit:
Age of Parchment
Age of Gutenberg
Age of Internet
Then I realized that Martin Gurri had developed five waves of communication in his Revolt of the Public, first published in 2014 and updated in 2018. It goes like this:
Invention of Writing
Invention of Alphabet
Invention of Printing Press
Invention of Mass Media
Invention of Internet
So I reacted to that with something Real Simple.
Age of Gutenberg
Age of Mass Media
Age of Talk-Back
All well and good. But yesterday I read a piece about Harris campaign “digital director Rob Flaherty” who talked about how the campaign tried to get into the independent media world. And failed. He tried to get Harris onto various sports shows and podcasts.
But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down.
Flaherty was honest enough to see the bigger picture:
The media successes of 2024 were independent, nontraditional online personalities who themselves were avatars of the rewards of going up against the Establishment.
The reason folks are seeking alternative sources of media and are turning away from political news is because they don’t trust our institutions. They don’t trust elites, they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust all this stuff. So the party of elites and institutions is going to have a hard time selling to people in these places[.]
Godfrey Daniels! Mother of Pearl!
So Flaherty warbles on about the left creating its own “independent media ecosystem.” But would that work? Flaherty is pretty well admitting is that people are going to independent media because they don’t trust regime media.
Anyway, reading that piece made me think that the name of the Fifth Wave or Fifth Age or the age after mass media is “Age of Independent Media.” Because, of course. After the shut-up-peasants Age of Mass Media, we normies are going to want a world completely free of Mass Media bossiness. So now each of the five ages follows a Disruption that changes the rules:
Invention of Writing: stories get written down.
Invention of Alphabet: literacy gets much easier.
Invention of Printing: intellectuals rule the world.
Invention of Mass Media: springtime for propagandists.
Invention of Independent Media: normies get to talk it over.
Do you see that each disruption, each invention, changed everything? Back in the old days the stories about the gods and the creation of the world got handed down in spoken speech, in songs and meter and rhyme. But with writing, and especially an alphabet, you can write down sacred texts — and also business records! — and the world changes.
Then, with the Gutenberg printing press, all of a sudden books became much cheaper. And your top intellectuals got their thoughts transmitted all over the world. I have been reading a biography of Marx, and he literally lived in his study, lined with books and pamphlets in bookcases and stacked on tables.
Then it was Mass Media. Think of the difference that mass media made, starting with newspapers and ending with network TV. It enabled rulers to create and impose One True Narrative — with the help of their bribed apologists in the media. And we have seen, from the Twitter Files, how the rulers managed and controlled the Mass Media environment, using Intelligence Community professionals to control the Narrative.
And now the wheel has turned, and a Democratic Party “media director” is mourning that the old days are over. That sports and podcast bros don’t want to talk to his candidate. That they “don’t trust our institutions.”
They don’t trust elites, they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust all this stuff.
Independent media. The new age. Get used to it, you tippy-top intellectuals and activists and ruling-class monsters. Because the rules have changed.