Chapter 4: The Public Realities

When the public knows what the media knows, and the media knows it, then the equation will start to change.


In the beginning, was reality.

No rationale, no hindsight, no neurosis. Just primitive human beings, with their bare hands, in a raw environment, and the reality of surviving, or not.

The first realities of human survival were food and water. Where was the food? Where was the water?

So food and water were not the first human realities at all. The first, original, human reality, was information. Where was the food? Where was the water?

If you made a movie about media history, and played it backward, it would speed back from a scene of this World Wide Web screen, through television, radio, the telegraph, the first newspapers, the Gutenberg press (which really did change everything), the scribal culture, the oral culture, papyrus scrolls, hieroglyphs, wood block prints, wall paintings, and then into vast spaces of time in which marks and symbols flashed by and disappeared, arrowing through guttural millennia toward the cusp where humans, separating upward and upright onto two feet, began their quest for survival with the original need for human
information.

From their first days on the planet, humans have needed information to survive. They have always worked very hard to develop information, at first mostly as a result of experience, including accidents, but later on as a result of experimentation. All of human knowledge is the result of information being developed, in one way or another other.

From birth, infants instinctively acquire information about their situation and surroundings. Parents and other adults provide much information to them, including their first information about how to make language.

Both primitive and civilized societies understand that its members can’t succeed without information, which is passed down to them beginning as children. In civilized societies, children begin school at four or five to acquire information. The basic information necessary to function successfully in those societies takes a minimum of 12 years to acquire. In the United States, parents are required by law to see that their children receive this information and understand it before they can “graduate.” After that, much more information is available to students who want it. All positions in a society, from homemaker to genetic scientist, require both general and specific information.

People in the United States get information from many sources, including, after all these thousands of years, experience. People are always learning something as a result of experience. But the single largest provider of information to people is the media. The media provides information to people through the seven media businesses: books, magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, recordings, and television. The information may be technical, or it may be entertaining, or it may simply be informational. Every day, people need all kinds of information, both general (the date, the time, the news, the weather) and specific (transport schedules, product pricing and availability, technical specifications, stock prices). They also want all kinds of information, including stories, plays, games, music, competitions, commentary and humor.

The second public reality is Demographics.

Demographics is the science of dividing people into distributions, or groups. No two people are exactly alike. But they are alike in many ways, and so they become members of demographic groups. The two basic demographic groups are men and women. Men and women are alike in many ways, but they are also so monumentally different that it is a wonder that they occupy the same general physical form.

A person’s demographic group plays a huge role in the media-public relationship. We don’t need to go any further than the men-women division to understand this. The media develops many products specifically for men, and many products specifically for women. Manufacturers and advertisers pay billions of dollars to support these media products, with products of their own that are very carefully conceived and created to appeal to men, or to women.

People are also divided into groups by race, nationality, religion, age, culture, economics, height, weight, color of eyes, and a hundred other factors that create within each of us a unique human being within our demographic group. A person’s reaction to a media event is unique to him or her, as unique as a fingerprint.

The media develops products to appeal to the preferences of demographic groups. Television programming, for example, is strongly influenced by viewers within an age group. Probably the most desirable group to television and its advertisers is the 18-24 age group. Programming or other media content aimed at a specific group or audience is called narrowcasting. Specialty magazines and cable television channels (the History Channel, the Food Network, MTV, the Weather Channel) are examples of narrowcasting.

The Third public reality is Curiosity.

Human beings are naturally curious. It is part of their need for information. They obtain information by being curious. Their curiosity makes people particularly interested in anything new. When people hear there is a “new show” on television, they are curious to see it. They are also attracted by anything unusual, or novel.

The media is very aware of this natural human curiosity. Working within its own realities, the media is constantly looking for ways to appeal to curiosity. Sometimes the appeal is culturally positive, because curiosity is positive in that it brings new and better understanding to humans of the world they live in.

But the appeal can also be opportunisitic. In the last 30 years, competition has become a huge, and difficult reality for the media. It is often the competition reality that entices the media to appeal to that sort of curiosity that causes humans to slow down and gawk at accidents on the freeway. This is the kind of curiosity that has for decades supported the tabloid media, and now is steadily, grimly, infiltrating the mainstream product. So many people are very curious about celebrities, their life styles and their weaknesses, and the media attracts these people, and the advertisers who want to reach them, with classic tabloid products like “Access Hollywood” and “The National Enquirer,” but also everyday celebrity “reality” shows, starring Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith.
©Michael Grant 2006