MINUTES of a MONDAY #83
#minutesofamonday
Audio Version👇🏼🎧
Brain Food > Shattered Glass
You can't understand November's election — or America itself — without reckoning with how our media attention has shattered into a bunch of misshapen pieces.
Think of it as the shards of glass phenomenon. Not long ago, we all saw news and information through a few common windows — TV, newspapers, cable. Now we find it in scattered chunks that match our age, habits, politics and passions.
Why it matters: Traditional media, at least as a center of dominant power, is dead. Social media, as its replacement for news in the internet era, is declining in dominance.
What comes next: America is splintering into more than a dozen news bubbles based on ideology, wealth, jobs, age and location.
This means where you get your news, the voices you trust, and even the topics and cultural figures you follow could be wholly different from the person sitting next to you.
So instead of Red America and Blue America, we'll have a dozen or more Americas — and realities. This will make understanding public opinion, and finding common agreement, even more complex and elusive.
Disclaimer: No, this doesn't mean The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or CNN are dead. It just means their influence will wane with most people in the other bubbles. Nor does it mean Facebook and Twitter will lose relevance. They simply will be influential in tighter bubbles.
A piece from Axios on the shattering media landscape
Soul Food
“Paper has more patience than people.”
Anne Frank
LOL
Andrew Schultz talks to a correctional officer:
Appendix
“Frame your thoughts like this - you are an old person, you won’t let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you’ll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
AOB
Hope you had a relaxing Easter weekend, thank you for reading and mind how you go out there - Niall.