technology

One thing that I think is really interesting to consider is how the information landscape has changed and what implications that has.

Before the internet and the prevalence of the "modern" internet, if you wanted to learn about something (especially if it was very new), then you almost certainly had to be exposed to PR to learn about it. This is especially true if you weren't an academic, so the majority of people.

I think this allowed marketing and PR to have a really captive audience especially because the lag in information was much longer. A news article could run in print media in under 24 hours with a narrative and the message would disseminate amongst people and the next turnaround time for something rebutting or debunking this narrative would be at least another 24 hours, assuming a different journalist was capable of producing an opinion piece with a really quick turnaround time or someone like a commentator or expert might be able to do the same in a letter to the editor (where they would get a tiny column that a lot of newspaper readers wouldn't even bother to read). But in realistic terms it might take a week or a month or longer for a countervailing narrative to emerge if people needed to hear about the article, track it down, do some independent research, and produce something that they might have to shop around in order to get it published somewhere. And then that countervailing narrative often has a lag time where it needs to circulate amongst people, often fairly gradually.

It was much easier for people to get hyped up on bullshit products or services and to be spun a lie or a carefully curated half-truth that could take root long before something more evenhanded and reflective of reality could begin to supplant it. If that latter part ever happened at all.

Now the way that marketing and PR has to function, as well as the thing I'm going to refer to as "narrative curation" (think stuff like Wikipedia or review sites which aren't actually PR but which aggregate info and which tend to preference certain information while deemphasizing other info in a conscious way), is largely very different because the speed at which information travels, the hugely expanded access/ready-accesss to information (yes, technically anybody could go to their local library immediately after receiving info to fact-check and develop a deeper understanding [as long as it was open] but in effect nobody was really doing that and so ease of access is at least as important to consider as a theoretical level of access), and the way that sources of information have been... I don't want to say decentralised because that's not accurate, but more like proliferated or something.

It's also interesting that another major difference is that this older model of information access meant that we structured ourselves to this access, in the sense that people would need to schedule their time around getting the news broadcast or they would have to listen to the radio program at the time that the radio program was playing.

Now I think that we have a situation where our schedule is not structured to our access to information anymore but, because our info access is on-demand, we are structured by our information access in the sense that the boundaries of time and place on information are mostly dissolved and so we become the demographics that are distinguished by how we primarily access our info - think the person who gets their news and politics from streamers on twitch vs the person who gets their opinions shaped by R*ddit comments and moderators vs the people who get their info from their TikTok feed, for example - and then this creates marketing profiles and algorithms that then dictate what info gets served to us; before this, the vast majority of people in the UK would watch the BBC and so there wasn't really a BBC "demographic" that you could describe in any particular detail. It was "British person who owns a TV and regularly watches it as their main source of info and entertainment", or virtually every British person.

I don't know where that leaves us.

I guess I'm just going to say that cultural critique is fascinating and all that but it's mostly just a sideshow and the really important stuff is our material reality so, idk, join a party and get involved in your community or spend your time reading theory instead of thinking about what I've said as being anything more than a curious bit of musing rather than (partly) uncovering some deep truth.

The difference is smaller if you consider that when you don't know what you want, you are not getting positive results from using any technology anyway.

So back then when you don't know what you want, you don't get anything. Now you get exhausting useless activities to kill time. You even start killing time you could use better.

I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.

Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.