frank_davis

I'd like to continue thinking out loud about opinion formation, and the idea that I introduced yesterday that our opinions may very largely be the average of all the opinions we've ever received. A couple of commenters suggested that we have our own personal experience to add to this, and that the influence of mass media is not to be dismissed.

Picking up the first of these, it seems to me that my personal hands-on experience of anything is always restricted to wherever I happen to be, with my hands and eyes and ears and nose. It doesn't tell me about anything else. And so more or less everything I know about anything else, over the horizon, is something that somebody else has told me about. It's somebody else's distilled opinion. In fact it's millions of people's opinions boiled down into books, maps, magazine articles, newspaper reports, TV documentaries, radio programmes, websites. Very little of my knowledge is the product of personal hands-on experience.

I have, for example, never been to America. And so I have zero personal experience of it. Absolutely everything I know about it has been mediated through other people, mostly in the form of movies and TV shows of one sort or other. I've probably seen so many of these that, although I've never been to America, I feel I've been there all my life. I know what Manhattan looks like, and Dallas, and San Francisco, and Las Vegas. I feel I could wander into a McDonalds and buy a Big Mac and french fries, and then cross the road and shoot pool and drink Budweiser for the rest of the evening. Yet I've never done any of these things, and I probably never will, because I feel I've done it all already.

If I'd been living in Devon five centuries ago, in 1510, I'd have probably been restricted to that county of England. I'd mostly have my own personal hands-on experience about lots of things, like riding horses and herding cattle and cutting hay. But I'd also have friends and family and co-workers. I'd meet up with them at the River (which, as an old half-timbered coach house, may well have existed back them), and listened to their tales of visiting Exeter and Bristol and even London, and all that they'd heard there. Or talked to seamen from Devon ports who'd sailed to Calais or Corunna. And if I could read, I may have managed to get my hands on a copy of Tyndale's English bible, and a few pamphlets of a subversive religious nature. And beyond that, I'd have attended the church up the road (it's still there) and listened intently to the priest as he relayed important news and advice from London or Canterbury, and then delivered some edifying sermon on the vice of gluttony, and the virtue of moderation.

Back then, the network of churches across Europe would have provided a sort of medieval internet, for those clerics with access to it, and also a medieval version of our modern mass media. Messages, exhortations, orders, etc from the Vatican could be propagated across Europe, and read out in churches on Sunday, when attendance was compulsory. But also back then, the new invention of printing was allowing all sorts of subversive new ideas to propagate around Europe as pamphlets and books, uncontrolled by either church or state. At least one reason for Henry VIII's takeover of the churches a few years later may well have been to gain control of this mass media outlet, to propagate his messages and exhortations around England rather than the Pope's or the Archbishop of Canterbury's.

Five centuries later, we have even more mass media outlets for authoritative education. Not only do we have pamphlets, but also numerous books and magazines and newspapers, but also radio and TV and movies, and telephones and text messages, and internet forums and chatrooms and blogs. And more get added every decade. The media environment is not the same now as it was just 50 years ago (no internet, few phones).

And 50 years ago, the new mass media were almost all just like the the old church pulpits - one-way broadcast media. And that meant that if you trusted the BBC (which everyone did) you'd watch and listen to their news and current affairs programmes. Or you'd read articles in the Daily Express. Or you'd watch movies once a week at the local Odeon. And maybe you'd listen to Roy Orbison playing on Radio Luxembourg (208 metres medium wave, I can still remember it). And so you were in an environment rich in one-way broadcast messages not very much different from what I'd have got 500 years ago via my local receiving station of St Barnabas church.

And here's where I'd like to respond to the second comment that alluded to the power of the mass media by saying that all these media are and were very powerful in shaping opinions. In Britain at least, the culture of the 60s was shaped more by Radio Luxembourg than by the BBC or any newspapers or books. In time it was supplanted by pirate radio stations anchored off British coasts until eventually the BBC got with the programme and started broadcasting non-stop pop music too. Right now, as I write, I'm listening to a digital commercial radio station that broadcasts nothing but the greatest hits of the past 60 years. Right now it's playing the Beatles I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

But I'd like to argue that the very latest media are entirely different from all these old media. The internet is an extension of the telephone network, and as such it's a two-way communication medium rather than a one-way broadcast medium. The internet allows people to answer back, in ways that the church pulpit and books and newspapers and TV and radio never allowed, or only residually allowed. And this changes everything. It changes the game completely.

It means that a newspaper article in the online Daily Mail about the jailing of Nick Hogan now has 400 irate comments attached to it, each of which is a little sermon. And blogs and forums all around the world are mentioning this little example of injustice.

And the internet has been demonstrating its power with Climategate, which was wholly internet driven, with the media coming late to the party. While the mainstream broadcast media have all been in lockstep together putting out a single message of global warming, the internet has singlehandedly managed to entirely subvert that message. And the broadcast media don't get it. They don't understand how that could have possibly happened. They seem to think that all they have to do is crank up the volume, and their authority will be restored. Much like the Church 500 years ago thought that it could stem the tide of the growing print-driven Reformation by stepping up the pulpit rhetoric.

The emerging media environment is one that is conversational, equal to equal, rather than broadcast by ecclesiastical authority to attentive congregation. And it creates entirely new kinds of communities. Instead of geographical communities sitting in churches, it creates multiple global communities of shared interest. And these communities form subcultures. Surfers. Pink Floyd fans. Stamp collectors. And they don't much talk to each other: surfers aren't much interested in talking to stamp collectors, and vice versa.

One result is the fracturing of a broadcast media monoculture into a multiplicity of subcultures. As the monoculture fragments, we increasingly no longer have a single shared BBC culture. And this may explain why the political classes these days increasingly seem to belong to an oddly detached world of their own. It may simply be that they belong to one of these emerging subcultures, with everyone equipped with iphones, blackberries, secure intranet connections, etc, which have created an enclosed political culture, with politicians talking to politicians, or to anybody else who's inside the loop. And in this new culture, inside the Washington Beltway, they all increasingly sound exactly the same as each other, much like the inhabitants of any closed culture everywhere tend to do. They say they're listening, and they are, but not to you. They're listening to their own internal cultural conversations, in which your voice has been mediated through numerous sources. And most likely one of these, along with numerous other quasi-governmental organisations, is ASH. They're inside the loop too. And when they periodically get asked about smoking bans, they report to inquiring politicians that they're a great success, and everybody loves them, particularly smokers. Smokers have no voice. They no more have a voice than Watford fans have in Burnley. They're locked out, shouted down, and pelted with bottles.

The new media environment is made up of more or less closed communities. There's the increasingly closed culture of the political classes, from which ordinary people are largely excluded. There's the closed culture of tobacco control, from which smokers are excluded. There's the closed culture of global warming, from which sceptics are excluded. And in all these closed cultures, where similar opinions circulate and get amplified, there emerges an orthodoxy of one kind or other. It's a form of groupthink.

It didn't used to be like this. In the past there was much more interaction across society. In a more leisured age, in which MPs had more time on their hands, and weren't making laws every day, and had no blackberries in their inside jacket pockets, they could meet their constituents over a few pints at a local pub, or chat to passengers on the train home. Remember that MP, Nick Winterton, a week or so back? The one who wanted to travel first class, because he worked during his train journey. Why was he working? And didn't that mean that he didn't want to hear the voices or the views of anybody else? And doesn't that suggest that when he arrived back at his constituency, he most likely didn't drop into the Railway Inn for a quick pint or two either? And that Nick Winterton consequently hasn't a clue what ordinary people are thinking. And nor do any other busy politicians, with iphones chiming in their pockets every few minutes.

Our increasingly fractured society may be as much a product of our new media as anything else. When David Cameron stands before television cameras and talks about Our Broken Society, and then checks his iphone for messages afterwards, he's completely unaware that it's the TV cameras and the iphone that are major contributors to that fracture, because whoever those cameras are broadcasting their images to, it almost certainly won't be any voters anywhere. Instead it'll be other politicians and pundits and activists who'll be chewing over what he says. And you can bet that, in the long list of phone numbers in his iphone, there won't be any of his constituency voters in there. And very few of his constituents will have his iphone number either.

If the Tories don't win the upcoming election, it'll be because they've spurned the votes of 15 million smokers who'd vote for them like a shot if they'd call off the dogs of war. I know I would. But they don't know about those 15 million votes. Because they're locked into a closed culture in which smokers have no voice, except mediated - and utterly falsified - through ASH and Deborah Arnott.

P.S. Old Holborn has begun an internet appeal to pay Nick Hogan's fine (see his righthand margin Justice for Nick Hogan). Old Holborn writes:

"£1 each - just 10,000 of you - let's see if the blogosphere can do more than merely rant in unison. Once the amount received totals the outstanding fine, they have to release Nick."