politics
culture
Media narratives and the minds of the masses
Narrative Monopoly Podcast
Media Futurologist
0
0
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
May 10th, 2021
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the world is governed by narrative. Actions taken during the pandemic, social unrest, and the election were downstream of the media narratives implanted inside the minds of the masses.
This isn’t rocket science, the media’s internal lexicon provides us with the mandate every journalist has — story. The north star of the news media is to write good “stories”, aka narratives. Every editorial meeting, every newsroom conversation, every lesson young reporters are taught revolves around the guiding principle of compelling narrative. This isn’t inherently bad, but because this is a systems level practice, the implications are enormous.
The impact of media narratives on the masses can be seen when they write stories about a vaccine that results in 1 death, sparking widespread panic in the masses. They leave out that 7.4 million people received the vaccine. The minds of the masses are primed to believe that a gunman may kill them at their next trip to the store, despite the fact they are exponentially more likely to die in a collision en route.
Turn on the news or pick up any newspaper and you will see a litany of similar examples. Our lizard brains are primed to view the world through narrative, which is why the media sells it to the masses.
Despite the fact we live in a world of ubiquitous information and democratized publishing, the News Media remains a network of voices maintaining a monopoly on narrative. While Social Media platforms may act as the waterways on which narratives are ultimately delivered, the media still owns the large container ships, the containers, and their goods. Most independent writers are still cruising the internet’s waterways on skiffs.
The power narrative holds over humans will never change, but the way in which information is distributed may allow truth to prevail. In order for the masses to decipher narratives, we need a key. That key is context.
If context is the key to providing the truth, how do we get more context? Context has already manifested itself in independent publishers — normal people writing about the world. They add the missing context to media narratives. In early 2020, before COVID took off in America, the media narrative was “just the flu”, independent writers were looking at the data and sounding the alarm.
Secondly, most independent writers don’t write narrative, they inform. Instead of a narrative regarding Amazon’s employees, independent writers make us smarter about their business model. Though less narrative is only part of the solution.
In the next decade we are likely to see a rise in new forms of distribution that allow for democratized narrative. Resulting in contextualized narrative. A democratization of narrative will allow for competition in narratives, increasing quality by allowing independents to collaborate in the same way legacy media does now. This will infuse narratives with context and greatly benefit society.
Democratized narrative is the solution to the media's monopoly on shaping the minds of the masses.
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