Comparison:
This reality brought us the informational landscape of the 2024 election, in which the two candidates were out chasing an array of niche audiences, foraging for votes in the wilderness of podcasts and the shifting sands of TikTok, while the remains of the mainstream media tried to impose narratives that ended up seemingly irrelevant to the actual results.
Ross Douthat argues that the internet and the rise of social media as a means of personal and collective expression counteract any moves toward manufactured consensus. Viewing Harris' and Trump's as campaigns as thrashing about in the wilderness and on shifting sands uses natural landscape metaphors to signal the differences in the 2024 presidential campaign compared to prior efforts to secure the White House.
Context:
The decline of the mainstream has been evident since the internet began its disruptive work, but for a while it appeared that digital life might bring some kind of establishment consensus back around — because if there were just a few big tech companies responsible for stewarding most of online interaction, and they all shared a certain set of values, then a kind of new establishment could be regulated or willed into existence, with Google and Twitter and Facebook taking the place of CBS and ABC and NBC.
This was the hope of some ‘anti-disinformation‘ liberals and a source of anxiety for many populists and libertarians, especially during the last years of Trump’s first administration, when there was a strong alignment of elite institutions and some real attempts at pandemic-driven information control. But for now it appears that both the hopes and fears were overstated, that the internet remains an acid for trust in institutions and an enabler of rebellions in a way that makes consensus and conformism extremely difficult to sustain.
This reality brought us the informational landscape of the 2024 election, in which the two candidates were out chasing an array of niche audiences, foraging for votes in the wilderness of podcasts and the shifting sands of TikTok, while the remains of the mainstream media tried to impose narratives that ended up seemingly irrelevant to the actual results.
Citation:
Douthat, Ross. “Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.“ New York Times, 16 Nov. 2024. Web.
(Image by Lee Aigue, base image courtesy of Wikipedia, Nov. 2024.)
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