MacDougall: Think of social media as an autoimmune disease

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Getting younger generations interested in rescuing legacy media is like trying to get someone to care about saving the life of a fictional character.

For younger generations, the legacy media is, at best, something their parents consume because they don’t know how to work TikTok. A newspaper that comes out once a day? Watching television reports hours after something has happened? What’s next, a telephone that’s stuck to one place in your house?

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Whether newsrooms like it or not, young people are increasingly relying on the unpasteurized information delivered instantaneously via social media platforms run by some of the world’s most wealthy and powerful corporations. Instead of this making them want to stick it to the man (the traditional prerogative of youth throughout history), they are instead stuck to the man in the form of their eyeballs glued to his screens. Paraphrasing the famous muckraker Upton Sinclair: It’s difficult to get a Gen Z’er to understand something when their pleasure depends on them not understanding it.

So, if you can’t get younger people to care about using legacy media, how can we get them, or anyone, interested in saving it? As ever, with a naked appeal to their self-interest.

No one wants to die. So think of a properly functioning news ecosystem as society’s immune system. Just as your immune system goes rooting through your body looking for harmful invaders and, once found, rallies your body’s defences to the rescue, so journalism does the same for our societies.

People in power have always abused that power. That’s why someone needs to hold them to account, and that has, for decades, been the legacy media. The free press has exposed scandals small and large to help keep the people in power honest and the citizenry informed. Yes, sometimes that immune system misfires, or misses an injustice but, by and large, it knows its job and aims to do it well.

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Stripping society of the functions of the legacy media (if not their form) is therefore akin to stripping your physical body of one of its most effective defences. By mainlining social media at the same time, you are exposing yourself to all manner of informational disease.

A social media platform designed to hold our attention takes the garbage information out there and amplifies it, precisely because it draws a reaction from our systems. The wilder the claim, the more eyeballs glom on, and the more the algorithms put that claim in other people’s feeds. We show a smidge of interest, the platforms amplify. And when the legacy media tries to take out a tumour such as QAnon, it ends up amplifying the claim. The tech-mediated information economy is like an autoimmune disease, a home-grown malady designed to kill our defences.

But the news of yore ain’t comin’ back, even if we desperately need its service. No business or business model lives forever. Netflix crushed Blockbuster, as Spotify crushed the record shop. Better product, better delivery, creative destruction, etc. Why shouldn’t the legacy media receive the same treatment.

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But Netflix still delivers movies and television and has pumped billions into productions. Netflix took the money Blockbuster made by selling and renting titles and invested it in the production of more content so it could, in turn, deliver that content. For their part, Spotify (and Apple) found a way to get people paying for music again after the rampant piracy of music in the early internet years. There is no shortage of content.

No similar dynamic exists with technology and the legacy media. As the media dies, no one is stepping forward to fill the void in accountability journalism. Hard news just can’t compete with the dopamine of technology as it is currently architected. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and someone in the bowels of China controlling the TikTok algorithm are keeping us stuck to our screens, all for the noble purpose of selling us stuff we probably don’t need. That’s the “bargain” we’ve struck.

No wonder the West is on its way to becoming a fictional character.

Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.

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