Source: Business Insider

Big food and media companies have created an illusion of diversity. When we focus on the differences between brands, we lose sight of their shared characteristics.

News consumers who hold a microscope to the differences between Fox News and MSNBC couldn’t see that the entire media narrative was controlled by a small handful of media companies who disguised their similarities by creating a culture of vicious debate within the range of their artificially narrow window of disagreement. As MIT professor Noam Chomsky once said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….” By focusing on the differences between Fox News and MSNBC, casual news consumers passively accepted and ignored all the things they agreed upon such as continuing military involvement in the Middle East, upholding the prestige of Ivy League universities, and until recently, the benefits of free trade agreements with China. The narratives they pushed were more alike than different, even if no single individual controlled it.

Consumers who were blinded by an illusion of diversity fell into the trap of the “narcissism of small differences,” Sigmund’s Freud’s idea that the small differences between people are exaggerated in our minds. People tend to fight over trivial differences that are easy to understand instead of complicated things that demand high-level thinking. In social science, this is known as the Bike Shed Effect. To prevent again the narcissism of small differences, ancient Jewish law strictly prohibited Jewish men from marrying two sisters. The smaller the differences between the two groups, the greater the intensity and frequency of the conflict, which is why family feuds and civil wars can be so bitter.

Sometimes, trivial arguments between pundits keep our eyes away from important stories that deserve debate. Often, the bloodiest online battles are waged over the pettiest conflicts, such as the bitter controversy over the sexist and dystopian politics of a recent Peloton commercial which caused the stock to fall by 10 percent. Ferocious debates over the politics of the television commercial pulled attention away from a more important story about the leaked Afghanistan war documents, which showed that the U.S. government deliberately misled the American public about its 18-year involvement in Afghanistan — the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.

II. The Explosion of the Soundbite

Compared to newspapers, television is less about ideas and more about images and sound. Whenever a new technology is invented, society adopts a new way of thinking and feeling. The scale, pace, and patterns of human activities move in response. Marshall McLuhan, known as the father of media theory, argued that book-oriented cultures tend to have a uniformity of thought. When media moves from text to images, societies start to worship glamour over truth, emotion over rationality, and youth over wisdom.

Content follows form. True to McLuhan’s prediction, television medium makes us focus on style over substance and prioritizes the trivial over the profound. The written word shines its spotlight on the content of a message. People who read the Gettysburg Address when it was written focused on the texture of Lincoln’s prose, not the fashion of his top-hat. In contrast, televised media highlights the messenger instead of the message.

The history of television news is defined by two distinct epochs: before and after cable television. By encouraging image-based communication, television changed how we think. It paved the way for a dictatorship of the eye over the mind, which creates an emotionally turbulent world which prized looks over logic and passion over reason. It deluded people into thinking the world could be summarized in small nuggets of pre-packaged information. In response, people outsourced their thinking to multinational media companies who “keep them informed.”

Since this media is easier for children to absorb than text, children can sneak into the adult world earlier in life. The average American adult watches more than four hours of television per day. Today’s children are intoxicated with adult images like war, riots, crime, and Miley Cyrus butt-twerking videos. Thus, television makes children act more like adults, and adults act more like children — which infantilizes adults.

Just as USA Today turned news into entertainment, cable television turned entertainment into news. Stations like Entertainment Tonight borrowed the traditional news style and created daily programs for celebrity news and gossip that aired at the same time as the CBS Evening News and ABC World News Tonight. Americans now expect news to come to them in small and easy-to-consume packaging — just like a bowl of sugar-filled cereal.

Once upon a time, Americans were more or less united by the same noble vision of the American Dream. Today, an increasing number of Americans live for the trivial pursuit of keeping up with the Kardashians. Here’s Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death:

"Although the Constitution makes no mention of it, it would appear that fat people are now effectively excluded from running for high political office… it is implausible to imagine that anyone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in today’s world… For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words… You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content."

Since the invention of television, politics has transformed into show business. On television, charisma and matters more than ideas. Looks have trumped intellectual substance for decades. Instead of reading the issues and voting for the best policies, television-voters decide between “the grandma in the suit” and the “tycoon with suave blonde hair.” Former President Richard Nixon once gave Senator Edward Kennedy advice on how to make a run for the presidency: Lose 20 pounds. A speaker succeeds as long as they keep the audience’s attention and pull on their heartstrings. Television-watching voters are moved not by nuanced arguments but by jokes and loud applause. Emotional reactions are loudest for divisive phrases like “we’re going to take down the enemy” and “we’re going to crush the other side,” which increased as public discourse moved away from the written word.

As Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator observed, since television gained popularity, the most charismatic candidate has won the presidential election. (To be clear, Graham doesn’t say charisma is the only factor in a presidential election. Rather, he argues it’s the most significant factor remaining after the tactics of both parties cancel each other out.) The 1968 election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey is the single exception to the charisma rule. Nixon knew he didn’t captivate voters on television, so he refused to debate Humphrey there. Instead, he used scripted advertising campaigns to reach voters through television.

Naturally, the presidents who best game our image-based media environment get elected. Marshall McLuhan once observed that “policies and issues are useless for election purposes, since they are too sophisticated.” Knowing this, our national leaders have become tribal overlords who rally their audiences with snappy slogans and emotion-filled speeches. In text, an argument needs to follow from one sentence to the next. But a speech demands no such rigor, so politicians win with short, catchy soundbites.

Between 1968 and 2000, the average soundbite of a presidential candidate was 43 seconds. By the end of the 80s, the figure dropped to nine seconds, and by 2000, it was 7.8 seconds.

The competition for the ultimate prize — presidential control over the nuclear football and weapons so powerful they could wipe out humanity — is won not by making well-supported arguments but by trolling opponents and crafting viral memes.

When we watch television, we focus less on what is said and more on what we see. By showering us with trivial facts that are easy to talk about but impossible to act on, television creates a society where people talk about political drama instead of by taking action directly or studying the specifics of public policy. For example, how many Americans scream and shout about the healthcare system without studying the influence of Purdue Pharma on the opioid crisis?

In addition to highlighting the trivial, television makes everything about the present, which prevents any discussion about the logic behind why things are the way they are. As Bill Moyers once said: “We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.” On television, people can change the channel with the click of a button, so television programs do not want to bore people. News directors design their programs so viewers can tune in at any moment without context, and be immediately entertained. They dumb things down so people can catch up. Thus, television programs touch only the froth of an argument and stay away from nuance underneath the surface. In the trade-off between entertainment and education, entertainment will always have the final word.

While books focus on the past, television directs its gaze towards a tiny fraction of the present. Only a narrow percentage of books focus on the present. Comparatively, the vast majority of newspapers and television focus on the here and now. By doing so, they pull us into a turbulent, never-ending present., filled with rage and fury. We drink cocktails of exaggerated headlines and shots of breaking news until we’re drunk on what’s trending.

The television world asks people to return to the news every day in order to keep up with the endless churn of information as if it’s the key to a noble and virtuous life. In reality, following the news is like running on a treadmill that spins faster and faster but doesn’t go anywhere.

III. Common Knowledge and the Benefits of Advertising

Too many people blame advertising for the problems of the media. Critics such as Walter Lippmann argued that mass media turned normal citizens into obsessive consumers when he said, “While television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.” Mindless media consumers become slaves to consumerism, paralyzed by fabricated anxieties that only purchases can suppress.

Through billboards and banner ads, companies engineer problems so their products can solve them. For example, bad breath wasn’t a problem people discussed until advertising campaigns in the early 20th century invented the problem and swooped in to solve it with products such as toothpaste and mouthwash.

Advertisers are applied psychologists. Instead of selling products, they tell people that by buying their products, they will become better versions of themselves. Advertisers know it’s better for their products to be misunderstood than ignored, so they capture consumer attention by focusing on the emotional benefits of purchasing a product instead of using facts, figures, and statistics that most people will ignore.

As any advertising executive will tell you, people overestimate their capacity for independent thought. The more a message is repeated, the more inclined people are to believe it. By creating the space for mass advertising, the mass market fragmented identity. People didn’t travel much before the invention of modern transportation. Most people lived their entire life in the same town and worked the same jobs as their parents. By unleashing individual desires, the mass market gave people the tools to express themselves. The most valuable brands seek to amplify our self-image. Apple represents creativity, Nike represents performance, and Harley-Davidson represents freedom. And by supporting these brands, we can speak to the world without saying anything at all.

Here, I’d like to defend advertising.

By subsidizing news and entertainment, advertising brought information to the masses. It made information free, which made the world accessible. In a span of decades, people who never had access to the broader world had near-unlimited advertising-supported information at their fingertips. And as access to newspapers, television, and magazines expanded opportunities for lifelong education, curious people gained a capacity for self-directed learning. Historically, advertising-based business models have been the most scalable way to finance free journalism.

By supporting the free (to consumers) or inexpensive distribution of information, advertising makes common knowledge possible. Micahel Chwe outlined the idea in a criminally under-rated book called Rational Ritual. Here’s how he describes the phenomenon of common knowledge:

“Knowledge of the message is not enough… for the message to be successful, each person must not only know about it, each person must know that each other person knows about it. In fact, each person must know that each other person knows that each other person knows about it, and so on; that is, the message must be ‘common knowledge.’”

It’s not enough for everybody to know a fact. Rather, everybody must know that everybody else knows that fact. Certain beliefs are only helpful if everybody in a community commits to them. The need to not only transmit information but create common knowledge explains why public rituals, rallies, and ceremonies are consistent across cultures. They don’t just transmit information. Rather, by making a shared set of beliefs explicit, they serve as an ethical blueprint for the community. Efficiency increases once common knowledge has been established because everybody levels up to a shared baseline of intent and understanding.

I underestimated the importance of widespread access to information until I studied the history of totalitarian regimes. Time and again, demagogues crackdown on public communications to prevent the spread of common knowledge. In a matter of months, an obvious truth can be downgraded from common knowledge to rude, to unspeakable, to unthinkable. And soon, citizens begin to censor themselves and disable their capacity for free thought.

Advertising-supported mass media enables people to unite in support of a common cause and rebel against tyranny. Rebellion is a coordination problem. Even if all the citizens despise their leadership, they cannot coordinate without common knowledge. But in the case of a rally, once some people start protesting, bystanders will follow because common knowledge has been created. Sometimes, the courage of one person can change the spoken preferences of an entire civilization.

Advertisers are happy to pay a common knowledge premium. Super Bowl advertisements are expensive because it’s the biggest event of the year. Each additional eyeball raises the cost of advertising because when a viewer sees an advertisement during a popular show, they know thousands of other people are seeing it too.