Leo Laporte on why Media Matters (DevLearn 09)
Posted on : 21-11-2009 | By : Eddie | In : Communication, Consumerism, Freedom, Internet, New Media, Old Media
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Sorry it has taken me so long to post this, it has been an extremely long week for me. This is the information I digested from Leo Laporte’s presentation at DevLearn2009.
Leo Laporte’s talk was about Media, how technology has changed it, and why it’s important for us to save the “democratic” flow of info we have. Leo explained that Mass media in the 20th century started with radio and was originally viewed as a one to one communication, usually from a ship to shore, kind of like the telegraph. It wasn’t until RCA introduced multicasting that radio really took off as a mass media. The success of radio as a powerhouse was in large part helped by Edward Bernays, the grandfather of PR, who invented mass advertising. Radio was subsequently used by advertisers to reach customers, who prior to that were using the mail order catalog.
Edward Bernays was an interesting guy and came from a very smart family (Sigmund Freud was his uncle). When he was hired to promote bacon, he went out to interview doctors and asked “Do you agree that Americans should have a hearty breakfast?” He subsequently came up with an advertising campaign that said, 4 out of 5 doctors agreed that you should eat bacon for breakfast. Bacon is hearty, doctors think you should eat a hearty breakfast, therefore you should eat bacon. Don’t think people are stupid enough to fall for that? You don’t understand propaganda (AKA Public Relations). That campaign was not a fluke. Bernays was hired by big Tobacco to come up with a way to get more women to smoke. The result? He hired women during suffrage movement to smoke cigarettes and created the “Torches of Freedom” campaign. Stick it to the man by lighting up a cancer stick. Boy, did that work.
Marketers know very well the power of mass media. For a long time, the fact that content creation was limited to those who had the means (as explained in a previous blog entry) made the average person very susceptible and the media moguls very powerful. Laporte talked about how he got into the media industry on his first stint as a disk jockey, and how much he had to beg and plead to even get on college radio. When he finally got a radio show, it was from midnight to 5 am on a Saturday night. Though he was the talent, his access to a mass audience was always controlled by the powers that be.
Years later he got his cable TV show. It was pretty successful and it attracted smart tech geeks. While the show reached 200,000 people, it wasn’t enough to keep him on the air. Advertisers weren’t buying. As his old boss put it, “Brand is the refuge of the ignorant: smart people don’t care about brand and are not swayed by ads”. Ouch.
Fast forward to today. Mass media (Old Media) is failing. Media companies that had a monopoly on communication are suffering. Technology has changed everything. Now a person like Leo can run an entire studio from a room in his house and have more listeners than ever before. His worth is not based on advertising dollars, but on content. I guess you can say that he can finally have smart viewers without the need to worry that the brainy geeks are going to get him fired. He has more freedom to speak and do as he pleases. Under the Old Media model he couldn’t speak up against advertisers even if he disagreed with them because they paid to run the show…now, he doesn’t have to worry about it because he runs his show, with his equipment, and they don’t pay his bills. I could come up with a multitude of ways that things have changed for the better, but the main point is that it’s all because the Old Media system is being destroyed and the two inventions made it happen:
1. The microprocessor, because it made it possible to move audio video, etc…and transmit at the speed of light
2. The internet: because it made the microprocessor come to life by giving us the network to transfer all this information and knowledge.
The media is crumbling because technology that used to be for the select few is now accessible to the average human being. No more towers, radio stations, recording studios, etc. Now, a person like me can have a complete multimedia studio on their desk (and I do!) and broadcast to a mass audience. Today, the internet is an enabler, tomorrow the cell phone (did you know there are people in Tanzania with no electricity, but plenty of cell phones? They use community charging stations…believe it!). This is unprecedented access and it scares the bejebus out of these Old Media guys!
You think these moguls will let their empires crumble without a fight? No way. They built an empire to numb us and make us all passive consumers, they are not about to let this internet thing get in their way. This is the reason these humongous companies are pressuring foreign governments, and our own, into signing the ACTA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement) in 2010 under the guise of “Counterfeiting”. These people are trying to gain control over our New Media to keep selling to us their CDs, Television shows, video games, and all the advertisement that come with dumbing us down!
I hope you value the freedom of information we are starting to see, and which we hope to have in years to come. I do. You should know that the internet is under attack from Big Media (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) and Communication (Comcast, AT&T) who are trying to shape the internet into a system that serves their financial interest. You all know that money is very powerful and these companies have lots of it. They are willing to buy off as many people as they can to gain control, including politicians. I’m of the belief that mass people can beat these companies who are trying to restrict our access. This is why I forward you Leo’s call to action. Please go to http://www.savetheinternet.com and sign the petition to force your government to stand up against these big corporations and save Net Neutrality. This isn’t their media anymore, it’s our media, and this is why media still matters.
I leave you with this. Edward Bernays was a man with a proven track record and many clients. He wrote:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
- Edward Bernays, 1928
Is this the world you want to live in again? I don’t.
Dude, we do live in that world, we always have and we always will.
It doesn’t matter whether you live under communism, socialism or capitalism, in a republic, under a monarch or a dictatorship. Money is always what shapes the world and its people.
The Internet has given us a glimpse into openness and a delusion of freedom, but nothing really changed. The fact that ACTA is gaining any traction at all is small proof of that.
Thanks for your comment. If anything, it’s a good way to start a conversation. I agree with some things you said, but disagree completely with most of it. To clarify, what you are implying is that we just stand by and do nothing? The part that scares me is the “we always have and we always will” part. As Laporte mentioned, we haven’t always lived in that world. Mass media and corporations have not been around very long (1900s), in relative terms, so that in itself is incorrect. But also, “We always have and we always will” also implies that things don’t change, fast! “We always have and we always will” were the last words of many who underestimated the competition and how fast things can change (Ford, Chrysler, Chevrolet, the Roman Empire, the economy, I can go on an on…). Need more proof?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think we’re talking about two different things. You’re focusing on the money, whereas I’m focusing on the current state of New Media. I really don’t want to get into a discussion about communism, socialism , etc., since I’ve never lived under those types of governments, but I will speak about our system, a democratic government in which the people are supposed to choose, through a representative they elect (by way of vote), as to what laws to enact and what interests to pursue (among many other things). The problem is, as you alluded to, that those with money have shaped our decisions for a long time. It’s has been those with the billions of dollars that have told our representatives what to pursue and how to vote…for the rest of us! This is wrong and stands completely against what our founding fathers intended. Corporations should not have control over governments.
As for the “delusion of freedom”. This system which we have created (and by we I mean the entire world, not America or Al Gore), is a system that allows you and me to share our ideas, pictures, videos, creations, etc. and that diversity (as Leo pointed out – the close to 95% crap) is what is important. Over the past 100 years, it has been a “freedom” that has only been afforded to the extremely wealthy. They were the only ones that had the means to create this content and most importantly, a monopoly on how it was shared. Well, this new system that we have created is a world-wide central nervous system that has given that power to the average human being* to become their own mass distributor of media. This is a very powerful gift that transcends governments (look at the effects of twitter and social media in the Iran controversy) and corporations should not have a say as to what gets filtered to us, by us, or what we say about them. Notice I did not say governments, I said corporations. The problem is that when corporations with special interests own the government, it is up to the people to call out their representatives and say…WTF!?
*I should point out, most human beings are still living in poverty and struggling to even get electricity, so obviously “average human being” was used very loosely. When the cell phone technology becomes widespread, I expect this “average” to be a true statement. Still, we have to prevent the system we created from being overtaken by these corporations, otherwise…we go back to the same old monopoly we’ve been living in.