Digital Democracy: New Media & the Future of Democracy, by Jeff Chester

This has been a frustrating couple of reading weeks--you know the sort, wherein you have three overdue library books to finish, plus the book you actually want to read, plus the book you're supposed to be reading for school... so I feel as though I have been reading bits and pieces of several books, really. Here's one of them.

I heard about this book in a Ralph Nader interview I happened upon (NB: this reading journal is NOT a political forum, and my only "hidden" opinion/agenda is a general dislike of large corporations' hold over us). I thought the book might be useful for my fledgling-but-growing media literacy unit that I started last year (kinda sorta fits into American Lit, right? hmmm). And it will be--most specifically, though, one chapter.

To start, I did not and will not read this whole book. There are a LOT of names, mostly of bigwig men in the FCC and corporations, and corporate anything kind of dulls me out, to be wholly frank. I read the introduction, and some of the subchapters within the larger chapters, but there were whole chapters I skipped. The books makes no claim at being impartial--in fact, I think some of the biased language and tone used will lend an interesting angle to our discussion of the chapter when we read it, and whether or not Chester's premise--that being tracked and targeted very specifically by our media is bad for us--is actually correct. I love fleshing out both sides of a juicy argument!

So the chapter I liked best, and will hopefully be able to use in class, is called "The Brandwashing of America: Marketing and Micropersuasion in the Digital Era." Clearly not unbiased, but really informative about ways in which our choices are monitored (for example, how often do you think about cookies? I admittedly dream of chocolate-chip regularly, but rarely consider the software variety sending information from my computer to internet sources).

This chapter is essentially about how the new media is growing not in response to wealth of information, but rather to suit the needs of marketing and revenue growth for major media outlets and their subsidiaries. As I already mentioned, Chester's premise is that the lengths to which marketers are now able to go (such as researching brain scans to maximize the emotional impact of a commercial) to target specific audiences is a destructive by-product of the FCC deregulation that Clinton passed as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which for the first time since 1934 removed restrictions on media ownership. This simply means that only a tiny number of large corporations control everything we see, hear, purchase, and--consequently--identify with and, gosh darn it, maybe even think. This is one of those "scary" books--with subheadings that invoke Big Brother--the predicts our dire future, but I have to admit that I, too, am not impartial, that my seeking out of this text and even the presentation of this unit to my students is because I somewhat feel that we are being "played" by the media. In general, our society is unaware of the degree to which we are being used. I don't know with any certainty that every aspect of our current media is always particularly harmful or bad--just that we should probably apprised of a few facts that we don't generally realize, such as:

1. Universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford make significant contributions to media and marketing research;
2. Theres a system called Advertising Digital Identification that assigns a code to every ad from every medium to track effectiveness;
3. "behavioral marketing" is the name for using your online history to determine which ads you are shown;
4. Digital and satellite television gives you such features as "on-demand" programming, but it also records your viewing behaviors to report back.

The bottom line is to just be aware of the subtlety of marketing and marketers. After all, this is a significant change from just a few decades ago, and it's rather jarring for us old-timers. Yet I think some people might actually see some good in this adware stuff... But at the very least, isn't our privacy compromised? And marketing, I think (my opinion here), sometimes blurs the lines of authenticity to the point where we aren't sure what we want anymore because we're just buying into prepacked notions of who we are--and, more importantly in American transformation culture, who we'd like to be.

While this book would probably only appeal to people interested in the subject (and it would have been a great David Brudnoy interview back in the glory days of his radio show), I think we all have some re sponsibility to know exactly what effects companies like Viacom and AOL (are they even separate companies still?) have because they control nearly all the portals through which we receive information and what gets marketed.

It simply can't be good to get all your news from just one ubersource--hey, even "back in the day" you wouldn't always listen to the same town crier, would you? We need a little balance in a democracy, as this book so readily claims.

And now? Off to finish Fever Pitch and Dr. Faustus!