Breaking News: There are problems with mainstream media! 😯
I DO listen to the “No Agenda” podcast regularly — and have listened to it for a long time (too long to share without feeling somewhat ashamed). Yet, it does feel good to consume John’s & Adam’s version of “media deconstruction” — and they can also simply be funny (and therefore fun) to listen to.
Nonetheless, over the many many episodes I have “consumed“, I have also reached a point of wondering why it makes sense to consume even more media deconstruction … especially because John and Adam continue to focus exclusively on mainstream media.
This leads me to the question: What media do there even exist besides mainstream media? The media few people know about, the stuff almost no-one pays attention to, and one fine example of that are indeed: rational media — but rational media (see e.g. “Introduction to Rational Media: Content vs. Container” [ https://contextual.news.blog/2020/04/22/introduction-to-rational-media-content-vs-container ] ) are not the only exceptional case. I wonder how I might refer to the vast plethora of sites which are neither mainstream media nor rational media.
Perhaps one way to resolve this issue is to find a name for all non-mainstream media. How about “non-mainstream media”? That would be all good and fine, but it would not really address separating what I might refer to as problematic media from non-problematic media. Most people are probably hardly aware of so-called “long tail” media — because they rarely (indeed: if ever) see such sites. When they do (occasionally?) see such a site (plastered with non-mainstream advertising or maybe a Google “parking page”), their immediate reaction is probably something like “OMG, a spam site!” and they close the window immediately.
These problems do not exist for rational media. Since rational media clearly state what they are “about”, there is no basis for “bait and switch” tactics, as is the case with all of advertising-sponsored media (which is very fundamentally based in such “clickbait” strategies). The main difference between advertising-sponsored media which are mainstream vs. advertising-sponsored media which are non-mainstream … is perhaps simply a prejudice created by the Human Brain Conditioner. Since a wide variety of organizations have been anointed throughout a wide variety of human brain conditioning processes, people find the sponsorship of clickbait advertising by these “establishment” organizations easier to swallow … and thus, every second another sucker gets hooked!
Yet there still remain a very large number of non-mainstream media which are neither rational media nor advertising-sponsored media. Let alone non-English language media ( and please also note that I have for some time also wanted to build online communities for bi- and multi-lingual native speakers — see e.g. “Multilingual Native Speakers Project” [ https://indigenous.news.blog/2023/01/07/multilingual-native-speakers-project ] ). My hunch is that the vast majority of “long tail” media are so-called “personal” sites — in other words: people who simply want to publicize their individual perspective on whatever they feel like sharing their “personal” point of view with the entire world.
The irony is that since these sites are probably unknown to anyone but their authors themselves, they are for the most part insignificant (even if in numerical terms they are quite significant). Indeed, many such authors seem quite surprised if / when I contact them. They often write on their sites that they are addressing “the void“. The feel anonymous. And unless someone happens to visit their site’s URL (see also “Infinity vs. URL“) for whatever haphazard reason, they essentially not only are anonymous — their site (and its contents) can be considered to be completely unknown to anyone except to the companies involved in creating and/or maintaining those sites (perhaps most of all: Google [1] 😉 ).
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