Trump and the Media by Zizi Papacharissi & Boczkowski Pablo J.; Papacharissi Zizi;

Author:Zizi Papacharissi & Boczkowski, Pablo J.; Papacharissi, Zizi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Donald Trump; media; journalism; news; fake news; alternative facts; populism; presidents; politics; identity; public; information; the press; authoritarianism; communication; elections; social media; twitter; democracy; technology
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Hobsbawm describes both a cultural and social transition, in which the logic of markets wins over social solidarity. The social institutions that supported Americans in their daily well-being weakened and fractured in this time. So too did our media. The logics of markets, although shaped by social forces, came to be seen during this time as independent of the values and needs of the communities and individuals that comprise them. In this way, markets logic tore at the threads of social life and by extension at society’s ability to connect and cohere in public spheres.

Which brings us back to Trump and the media in the twenty-first century. A focus on media as the cornerstone of democracy blinded media scholars to the powerful ways that connection and solidarity were being reimagined and rewoven in the twentieth century. New media intersect but do not wholly supplant these economic trends, and yet the powerful cultural image of an Internet, “free as in freedom,” renewed the possibility and the hope for communication to be relevant for democracy.

Consider Facebook and other social networking sites that now connect people in unprecedented ways, provide new forms of connection, and enable rapid dissemination of information in times of political crisis and upheaval. Social media sites fundamentally reshape how we feel, not think, our way through news and shape our response to it, creating what Zizi Papacharissi (2015) calls “affective publics.” They provide the social infrastructure that can be activated in times of political crisis. Our news is increasingly mediated by our social networks and consumed in what Pablo Boczkowski, Eugenia Mitchelstein, and Mora Matassi (2017) term as brief, interrupted, and partial ways, which is the biggest transformation of consumption, reception, and circulation of news since the advent of the World Wide Web. These partialities, fragments, and affective moments result in the lack of shared and coherent narrative in how we approach news and political life. More importantly, this fractured new media landscape cannot possibly reweave the threads of “social textures” long stretched thin by free markets, and now pulled to breaking.

As news mediation shifts from professional newsrooms to Silicon Valley algorithms, we have seen the problem with media and the problem is us. Trust in our social connections has now supplanted trust in the sources of news, creating a teeming environment for virulent and forged news to propagate. We are living in media and, to use Neil Postman’s (2006) words “amusing ourselves to death” with the affective pull of media designed to be enticing, exciting, inciting, addicting, and stimulating. The lines between news and entertainment are indistinguishable to readers, even if that line still matters in some newsrooms. At the same time, the affective pull of social media news slowly eats away at the capacity of another social institution—journalism—to be a source for the social empathy necessary for civic life.

Perhaps a corrective for this moment of declining social connection can be seen in the writings of a nineteenth-century sociologist, Emile Durkheim, whose work has not been used widely in media and communication.

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