Those who drive the media narratives at a given moment are not necessarily the same folk that are affected by what’s happening in the public space. It’s because the media narratives, and yes, a lot of the time even the social-media narratives, are driven by the elite drivers of media tittle-tattle.
‘Tittle-tattle’ was apparently used to describe a device that went off to alert shop-security of shoplifters. But let’s use the word anyway to describe the stories, especially the gossip that dominates the public space. ‘News’ is not spontaneous, and it’s not necessarily everything you wanted to know but was afraid to ask. The media space is filled with narratives all of which are driven by interest groups. Now, some of those interest groups are no doubt coterminous with the public in some way with public sentiment and interest group priorities may be one and the same at times. But that’s in rare instances.
Most of the time things don’t work that way. Take environmental issues for instance which gain traction only when elite environmental organisations focus on them. Until then these issues are a thorn in the side of specific groups and communities, but don’t make the cut to be splashed in the media.
Police bribery for instance is on the increase in this country, but that does not mean that it’s a story that gets the media attention it deserves. So it is, with stories that are connected to gender-related harassment and so on. But people are fed on the usual dose of media fed narratives and often social media are an echo-chamber for the storylines that are popular in the mainstream.
This is not a satisfactory state of affairs in a democracy, but every democracy big or small operates in this way. Capitalism or more precisely the driving forces behind capitalism decides what goes on in the electronic media and the newspapers, and just about any other platform that disseminates news and views on the internet.
BYGONE
No doubt the internet would have improved the situation, but social media platforms have the well-known or notorious algorithms that determine what gets promoted and what doesn’t. What drives these algorithms are often what’s fed in most aggressively into these platforms by interest groups and individuals who have the wherewithal to promote what they want promoted. So modern day media is not necessarily a space that’s free of certain types of pressure and negative influences even though sometimes business and vested interests so-called also can disseminate stories that are meant for the public good.
But the latter is a rare phenomenon. The story of Erin Brokovitch became a hit Hollywood movie that won several awards. But that was in the 90s. A movie of this sort may not be made today, the reasons being many and having to do with what was underscored earlier — algorithms and other social media technical drivers. But it’s not just algorithms. Today everything seems made to order. Even movies are strangely more formulaic than they used to be. It’s due to the fact that what gets to be screened is dictated by the considerations of commerce. Simply put, money rules the game.
In this country there were perhaps very few Erin Brokovich like situations. But even so there were folk heroes and vigilantes. But that was during the days of Saradiel, someone may say. Or even Sara-goiya. Sara-goiya does not refer to any friendly personality in the NGO circuit, but is about an eccentric individual who took the Mickey out of the colonial masters in a bygone era. It’s the longest running Sinhala cinema playback song, originally sung by Mabel Blythe who was an actress with a Burgher father and a Kandyan mother. Her mother was so dead-set against her daughter pursuing a movie career and sabotaged her first interview with a producer by tying her hands with a rope to a window-sill and locking her up in a room. However, Mabel made it to the interview anyway because her father took pity on her and took her to Colombo for the chat with the producer, against the ‘better judgement’ of the mother.
That Sara-goiya was the longest running movie playback song is fitting because it’s about a man who runs. He just keeps running in his village when a colonial era cop starts chasing him down. Finally the cop catches up with the runner and asks him why he is running and what mischief he was up to. Sara goiya deadpans that he didn’t know there was a law against running because indeed he was going as fast as his legs would carry him for no apparent reason. He was running, he said, that’s all and as far as he knew, there was no law against that.
UPLOAD
That was a bit of a digression about the maverick runner (not running-mate, a distinctly different species) but the point is that free spirits and their causes rarely make the public space via the media. Not just that, even big causes in small spaces which are by no means the concerns of a few individuals but are the causes of a community, also don’t often make the media space. Some stories are ferreted out by intrepid investigative journalists but that is a dying breed too these days, because social media fosters the herd instinct and there is remarkable uniformity that’s demanded of the coverage of news and views.
Niche organisations and niche journalists that don’t necessarily work for the mainstream or the ‘mainstreamed’ social media sites are therefore necessary to get certain stories out there so that worthy causes and worthy people are not ignored in the algorithm-driven media sweepstakes. But are there any such niches? There is apparently a breed called citizen journalists but then again sometimes this can be a mere label for more organised media operations.
True, citizen journalism may be done by random individuals who wield handphones with video cameras and upload instances of corruption etc. onto the internet. But such one-off exposes, though they have a positive effect, are not focussed efforts. No doubt there is much that’s gained as a result of say exposes of racist attacks for instance by private videographers, who have taken clips of outrageous incidents they have seen as bystanders as the world goes by. Spike Lee the moviemaker said that it’s not a case of incidents of racism increasing, but just that whereas there were no cell phone videos those days, there are plenty now because private people have access to video cameras in this smartphone age.
EXAGGERATION
Both here and in the West as Spike Lee has pointed out, this type of exposure has positive results no doubt. But it’s not exactly journalism and it’s the other causes that are not necessarily seen by bystanders that get ignored or never make the cut to make it to either the mainstream or to social media.
Imagine that there is slow-poisoning of a community due to water contamination. This is not seen by the passing video vigilante. Even today with all the technology that’s available these types of issues have to be ferreted out and splashed over the media with great deliberation, else these matters get ignored altogether. But who does such nosey-parker reporting these days? There aren’t many public busybodies who are doing such public interest work because they feel swamped by social media content. They feel they cannot compete with feel-good selfies and ubiquitous videos of cats.
It’s a strange world out there where there is more opportunity to expose wrongdoing and work towards the public good, but less gets done all the time. Is it an exaggeration to say that useful media output is inversely proportional to the opportunities available for people to get their stories before thousands of eyeballs? Even eyeballs is a clinical term but it has come to stay. ‘Eyeballs’?. As if it’s not people who read news or watch news videos, but mere eyeballs or disconnected soulless cyphers. Much work has to be done to get past this malady of ‘more is less’, in the modern public media space.
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