Why Controlling the Masses Through Media No Longer Works | Jordan Greenhall | Big Think

I don't want to go into the history, but there's actually a really neat history of exactly why and how a particular set of ideas became so important in the latter half of the 20th century.

I'll give you just one example, but the idea of operational management, which was innovated during the heat of World War II and largely to do things like make strategic decisions about how we were going to go about moving ships across the Atlantic or run bombing raids on Germany using statistics, actually applying statistics to analyze the effectiveness of different approaches and then therefore making decisions based on statistics.

And so operational management was very effective in the military theater, and the people who had learned those techniques after the war percolated out into the broader economy and started applying those techniques in things like deciding how to run their businesses. So that's the basic framework of the order that we built up until now.

Now, the idea of the Blue Church is trying to get a sense of what it is that is the essence of the control structure. By control, I don't mean necessarily anything bad; I just mean the mechanism by which we're able to make collective decisions and engage in effective collective actions, the thing that holds our decision and action structure together.

The control structure that still is the one that we're operating under that came out of that timeframe; and the proposition is that, in addition to—and this is one piece but it's a very important piece—that there's a dominant role played by the structure of media. We're actually in the process of breaking that apart right here, so this is good.

We know that there's a particular dynamic associated with the kinds of media that are broadcast where one individual or group, because of the nature of the medium, so for example, broadcast television in the day of three networks, there were only three people who got to be the anchors who communicated out to the entire population.

It was a massive asymmetry between the speaker and the listener, and there's no interaction. So I am in a position of listening, you're in a position of speaking, and there's 30 million of me and one of you.

Now, that's actually a very important dynamic. If you don't understand the fact of that and its importance, you're going to have a very hard time understanding what actually happened during the latter half of the 20th century as, in particular, television emerged as the dominant medium, displacing radio and newspapers.

And by the way, you also have a hard time understanding what's happening now as the Internet is now emerging as the dominant medium, replacing television. Just understanding that transition and what it implies and means at a deep level is sort of fundamental for predicting future states.

So using sort of television as the metaphor, I then looked back and said: all right, are there other things that we see that look like that? And it's actually quite interesting that, for example, school has a very similar shape to it in the sense that you've got one speaker, a large audience, and very little interactivity, particularly like the university setting where there's a lecture and there's 500 people in the lecture hall.

That is effectively the same thing as television in the sense that the relationship of information flow is effectively the same. This is important both from sort of the social dynamics as well as the psychological dynamics because if, as a child, your primary relationship to how you engage in culture is one of almost certainly being a pure receiver, then your psychological development, your set of assumptions and habituations, and how you adapt to the world will be associated with that environment.

You're adapting to your local environment, and this implies a certain set of deep psychological structures. So we get a relationship between the mechanisms and techniques and potentialities of broadcast as a concept—so school, television, fill in the blank—and the behavior strategies, the habits, and even the capacities of the individuals in the social...