Opinion: Silicon Valley journalism needs to do a sharp 180, treat readers respectfully
Image by Wikimedia Commons
Many folks read San Jose news and feel they're manipulating our emotions for engagement—whether via “rage bait” or shallow fan service. (No wonder San Jose pols are turning to film and fiction for wisdom!) On Substack, documentarian Michael Nayna argues media shouldn't see its consumers as profit machines or moldable clay, but fellow thinkers.
Since the time of the 80s “A&R man”, the mass media machine has evolved into the all-consuming behemoth we live amidst today. The archetype Zappa sketches out has cleaved into two distinct species of middle person - the“statistical man” and the “priestess”. These two species belong to a clade of contemporary power brokers often pejoratively referred to as the expert class, the managerial elite, or Mary Harington's cyborg theocrats.
The statistical man justifies his influence through hard data. He sees the audience as consumers, and his success metric is profit. He analyses the measurable consumption habits of the masses to identify target demographics and guides artistic decisions toward existing trends in the market. The influence of statistical man over media production has grown in concert with the breadth and sophistication of his data. What started as vague reasoning around box office numbers and focus group surveys has evolved into big data analytics grounded in the market’s every click. Production and promotion of content, particularly in the case of film, can be expensive, and the statistical man is seen to mitigate investment risk through quasi-scientific rationale.
The priestess is a different force altogether, she’s not driven by profit but by moral influence over the masses. She enters the mass media machine through its bureaucratic and managerial layers with a belief she can mould the morality of the audience by curating the messaging embedded in any given piece of media. Often with little to no ground-level production experience, she justifies herself through the critical analysis of the industry itself; a practice she learned in the university courses we critique in The Reformers.
The priestess will often lean into the language of statistical man and mimic his forms to expand her influence. …
The pervasive influence of the statistical man and the priestess manifests as a hollowness in the establishment’s output. They view their audiences as consumers and congregants so of course we’re delivered art that feels like theme park rides and sermons. Work of genuine artistic merit occasionally breaks through the distortions of the middle people, but this is rare and typically only happens when a producer of Rembrandt-level skill achieves something exceptional. …
The beauty of this platform, and the internet more broadly, is that we can embrace demystification, and subvert established distribution networks. Here I can narrowcast to a global self-selecting audience to find a large group of like-minded people willing to support my work. If we develop the right kind of relationship, we can create some weird and wonderful art that would likely sit dead on the desks of the middle people. …
I don’t want to follow the path of the statistical man by focusing solely on back-end analytics. I also don't want to view you as congregants and slip into the widespread interent phenomenon of digital cult leading. I want to experiment freely, make demands on your attention, challenge you, and myself, and then harvest insights from the best of you in a refining process that will hopefully culminate in inimitable, large-scale film projects.
Read the whole thing here.
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