1. The phenomenon
There has been a major shift in how people consume media and media consumes people. Cheap to produce and consume modern media, from cable television to the internet (but mostly the internet), has affected us in many ways, not necessarily the ways we expected it to. A lot can be learned by comparing how we thought something would affect us and by how it actually did; by comparing what we saw coming and what we didn’t. Sometimes, that will highlight patterns. I’d like to bring four examples that highlight one pattern: while media is expected to reduce variation and make tastes and markets more homogenous, in reality the internet often creates unprecedented diversity.
I. Porn
Since the 1960’s if not earlier, mass sexualized media in advertising, television and film, not to mention explicit pornography, have become commonplace. A combination of changing social mores, technological change and late stage capitalism have snuck all sorts of sexualized images and imaging into almost everything. It seems pretty reasonable that this would have social consequences; to expect that the ubiquitisation of high definition sexual super stimuli would have some sort of social/psychological effects. What were they?
One expectation was that sexual media would affect sexual preferences, both on the sell side (body image) and on the buy side (sexual tastes). This expectation was especially pronounced re pornography. Pornography and sexual mass media were expected to mostly feature very specific body types, influencing the real life preferences of consumers disproportionately to the actual prevalence of those physiques. The map would influence the territory. This would create an artificial uniformity in sexual preferences, creating a gap between overly uniform desire and highly varying reality.
To some degree, something of the sort seems to have happened, though it is hard to show causation. Sexualized media and advertising usually portray models with very specific body types, which are very similar to those that inspire cosmetic surgery, eating disorders other body image issues. Generally speaking , the public standards of attractiveness are well established and align closely with the types of bodies displayed in mainstream sexual media. It is seemingly a self evident truth to most of us that fat women/bald men/etc are not attractive.
While the proliferation of internet pornography has not necessarily stopped this, it has allowed a different dynamic to develop in parallel. Internet pornography has created/discovered an almost infinite variety of genres of pornography for an almost infinite variety of niche preferences, including those traditionally not considered attractive. The economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has studied this extensively, using pornography search data, showing that in this area the bizarre is increasingly commonplace. There exist categories of pornography for almost any imaginable body type and context, and they are much more popular than stated preferences would suggest. Instead of making sexual preferences more uniform, the opposite occurred. Internet pornography with its ease of access, anonymity and wide variety allows consumers to discover and develop proclivities and preferences they may never have been aware of otherwise.
II. Slang
It is commonly understood that mass literacy and media limit linguistic divergence. When languages are allowed to spread geographically, they do. Left to their own devices, they fragment and splinter and diverge into dialects. And without anything holding them together, slowly those dialects lose mutual intelligibility and grow further and further apart. Accordingly, languages with longer traditions of mass literacy and media, like English, tend to have significantly less dialectal variation than languages for which mass media and literacy are relatively new, such as Arabic. Communication over a distance breaks through isolation.
This was all true, still is and probably always will be. We would expect the ubiquity of the internet to do the same thing, and in most ways it does. Australians and Americans are reading and listening to a lot of the same English, probably more than ever before, influencing the language they speak. But something else happens on the internet as well. As anyone who has ever read a post on any mildly obscure forum knows, internet subcultures develop jargon and slang like fungus in the darkness. The language used on them can go from plain English to almost impenetrable jargon and insider lingo with dizzying speed. Even fairly mainstream platforms, like twitter or reddit, develop rich terminologies that take a while to learn, and that goes much further for anything slightly more niche. This in itself has produced its own genre of internet subculture lexicography – Urban dictionary (which despite its name lists mainly internet slang), R/outoftheloop and the many lexica written for the uninitiated of myriad sub cultures.
III. Netflix
We are used to thinking of American television and movies as the global default. People watch Ellen in China and CSI in Germany and Friends in Saudi Arabia. While they also watch local language television, even the less educated probably still watch American or Western television as well. Americans, on the other hand, watched American television. This was a major channel for American culture and values, and one of the main ways they’ve proliferated globally. It created the impression that American media was global media and that American culture was global culture, and indeed, Hollywood and American television have had a significant influence on the rest of the world, in a sense even becoming universal among the global upper classes.
The internet, and particularly Netflix, have let something else happen too. The rest of the world still watches American television, probably even more of it. But now they, as well as Americans, are watching Swedish and Israeli and Spanish and Korean television. Americans are watching Korean soap operas, Swedes are watching Casa de Papel and Saudis are watching Friends. Global audiences can now discover foreign shows they like that don’t necessarily come from America, and most surprisingly, that even includes Americans.
IV. Politics
In what is a long standing consensus from Chomsky to Trump, mainstream media news have a strong influence on the views of those who consume them. The media doesn’t only transmit information, it also chooses what information to transmit and how to frame it. This is still a major political issue, since the most important voters, the independents/undecided, will usually watch the mainstream (and not explicitly aligned) media rather than explicitly partisan media. But it is less relevant than ever before, due to the now famous filter bubbles. Since the media explosion, it is perfectly possible and even quite likely that a conservative will get almost all of his news from conservative outlets and vice versa. Instead of the media determining views (to whatever extent that ever happened), views determine media.
We are used to a world where viewers of different political persuasions all consume the same media, enabling those media outlets to have significant influence on their opinions despite the viewers varying vantage points (even if only by choosing what to show).
But in the age of the internet, right wing viewers watch right wing media and the same for the left. Now viewers are consuming media that is aligned with their original political preferences, which much lowers the influence of the mainstream, neutral, default media and creates the risk of people rarely hearing things they don’t agree with.
2. Pattern
These four examples show a common pattern; media usually has a homogenizing effect, resisting the tendency of different people in different places to differentiate themselves from each other. But newer forms of media, particularly the internet, have had the opposite effect, letting a hundred flowers bloom in ways that they wouldn’t have earlier. There are significant differences between these examples, but they all highlight a major difference between the effects of the internet and traditional media. What drives this?
I. Targeting/matching
Let’s go back to our first example, porn. If you hang up a billboard with a pretty woman on it to grab eyeballs, you’ll put on it the model with the widest appeal. It might not be a perfect match for the personal preference of every individual consumer, but you will have no choice other than to go for the lowest common denominator - there is only one image and it will have to do for everyone. Presumably, a similar calculus stands behind the editorial strategy of mainstream pornographic magazines. But on the internet, where there is infinite space and search engines let consumers find and choose exactly what they want, it starts to make sense to cater to what a consumer actually wants, and not just the lowest common denominator.
In a study made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, Howard Moskowitz showed that there often is not one ideal product or combination that the consumer wants. Commissioned to find the ideal Pepsi recipe, he claimed that there was none – consumer tastes were all over the map. There was no ideal Pepsi, there were many ideal Pepsis. He later demonstrated this when he discovered/created a large market for extra chunky tomato sauce; previous makers of tomato sauce had all aspired to the same smooth ideal of classic marinara. Consumers have a wide variety of preferences, and one size fits all rather loosely. On the internet, with infinite shelf space and very low costs to create a new product, there is no limit to the number of types of tomato sauce or Pepsi that can be sold.
II. Market size
Even if you can find/get to the consumer with the niche taste, are there enough of them for it to be worth the trouble? Is there a large enough market for the preference I’m catering too? Almost by definition there is a large market for the lowest common denominator, but what about more particular preferences?
The internet excels at creating/discovering markets seemingly ex nihilo, by aggregating like minded consumers from all over the world. And then, voila, who knew there were so many people who were into x? The resurgence of the extreme right/ alt right is a good example. There were always a few Nazis here and there, but they weren’t concentrated and they couldn’t find each other. The internet allowed them to find each other online, both because of the anonymity and because there now was a place to find anything. On the internet, rare is no longer lonely. Like minded or preferenced people can find each other, and potential suppliers can find them. The internet allows sellers to find buyers, and it also allows buyers to find each other. On the demand side, markets have formed where before they (and we) didn’t know they existed, and they are now easier to target and cater for than ever before. That is how internet creates/ discovers audiences for rare or highly dispersed or taboo tastes. This is true for products as well as for media – it might not have made sense to open a store selling something only X people globally would buy, but a website is another story.
These communities that the internet has created/ discovered have allowed new language communities to form, as well as creating new markets. In addition to creating sufficiently large markets for many more products/ services to be worth producing, it also makes it easier and easier for producers and consumers to find each other on increasingly fine grained levels. A billboard can’t target anything other than the lowest common denominator, but the internet can help me find exactly what you really want, and sell it to you.
III. Costs and barriers to entry
Add the above to lower and lower barriers of entry to producing media of most types, and many other types of products and services as well. It has never been this easy or cheap to make a video or publish a novel. The minimal necessary market for something to be worth producing depends on the cost. As the cost goes down, so does the amount of potential consumers necessary to make it worthwhile. These are the two blades of the scissors; new markets are created and enlarged while the minimal necessary size for a viable market shrinks.
IV. The loop
All this creates a huge proliferation of niche markets, as people find and sort themselves into new market segments that weren’t previously known to exist. And this creates a feedback loop – when people develop a taste, it becomes more and more specialized and defined. Consumer tastes for a product that doesn’t exist won’t be very developed. But as options appear, consumers become discriminating, and develop more sophisticated and discerning tastes. As these niche markets and subcultures spring up, the consumers educate themselves and become more and more engrossed in whatever the hell the product is and more and more finicky about it.
And another feedback loop. There is always a give and take between producers and consumers. Producers try to produce what consumers want, and they iterate their products based on market response. In parallel, consumers are educated by producers and exposed by them to new products. The internet tightens this loop, and producers can iterate much faster and get much more detailed feedback from their consumers, through market response, through direct communication and through the reams of data collected by the likes of Netflix. On top of this, dropping barriers to production essentially allows any sufficiently motivated consumer to become a producer, either because he is inspired by them or because he wants to improve on what he see or cater to any even more niche preference. The line between producer and consumer blurs. The exemplar of this is the thirteen year old youtuber or streamer who starts off by emulating his olders and betters, more established providers of media or entertainment and then ultimately, with a bit of luck, becomes one of them.
But since the media game is winner take all, it even further drives small time producers to become more and more niche in hope of finding an audience. It is very hard for a new teenage aspiring youtuber to compete with established youtubers with millions of followers. So one possible strategy is for him to go and become a mainstay of whatever subgenre or microtrend or nano niche. It’s much harder to be a star of piano youtube than of harpsichord youtube. It’s easier to become a slightly bigger fish in an ever smaller pond, and the more stages there are the more lead roles there are.
The end result of this is that the internet lets people sort themselves differently. Not by geography, juxtapositon or demographic default but by inclination, and finer and finer gradations of inclination.
3. Globalisation
The final consequence of this is in combination with globalisation. While globalisation and global media may homogenize global cultures on some level, as people all over the world eat hamburgers, pizza and sushi, the new generation of media also allows a new type of cultural proliferation, one not determined by geography. This is driven both by the creation of new cultures and subcultures, as well as the adoption of national/ethnic cultures by foreign sympathizers (Scottish Japanofiles, Chinese Rastafaris and whatever can be mixed and matched). Cultural appropriation becomes commonplace when you can learn how to do a haka or a tea ceremony on youtube.
The internet first allows unprecedented access to variety and then makes subcultures subdivide even further and further, all in parallel to a surface level mainstream culture. In a way it creates a form of Diglossia, albeit one in which most dialects / subcultures are highly accessible to everyone. And as identity becomes fluid and the basic cornerstones of identity; gender, nationality, race, religion, etc. become more negotiable than they were traditionally, and as selective elements of identity become more important this proliferation of cultural combinatorics may well have a significant influence on our cultures, identities and lives.