Mass phenomenon in popular media

Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" in response to the rise of widespread mass media. I have always taken that to mean that when media was slow (word of mouth, could only travel as fast as someone on foot or horse) our area of interesting information extended about as far as the ground local villages covered. If something happened to someone 100 miles away, you probably never heard about it.

Or cared. Because it was not relevant to you. Or important.

Consider numbers and proportions and statistics for just a second. A village has at most a couple hundred people. Often less. If something happens to 1% of those people, you will know about it. If something happens to .01% of those people, you probably will never hear about it. Further, that number is so small, that the significance of it happening at all is fairly unimportant. Logically, you probably shouldn't even care.

But now, our "village" is defined by the boundaries of a much larger communication range. We can cover the entire planet, but let's forget about that and think of just the United States. If something happens in Plunketvilleport, Maine (yes, I made that up - but doesn't it just sound like all the little puny towns on the east coast?) then we can hear about it within minutes on the west coast. Consider the visibility of small statistical probabilities now. We are talking about things that can occur to .000001% of the people, because the possible population we are talking about is the size of the entire United States.

"But wait," one might say "if it is that small a proportion of the population, why would it make it on the popular media?"

Because the media lives for spectacle. It makes more money, and the more unusual and the more bizarre something is, the more it rubs against people's sense of right and wrong or curiosity, the more the media desperately wants to pick it up.

Add to this another important factor. Consider the TYPES of people who work in popular media creation. These are people interested in popular media. It is just like computer software - the people that make it are into computers, and think EVERYBODY should be into computers as much as they are. Likewise, the people who film, write and report the stories think everybody should be fascinated with the same things they are. And what are they fascinated with? Well, just take a look. They are fascinated with Octomom, Jon and Kate, Britney, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton, Oprah, Angelina Jolie, Madonna.

The end result of this is that the bulk of popular media fills up with an increasingly larger quantity of trivial material. These are events and occurences that 1> occur with very low levels of statistical significance, 2> are so far and distant from the people consuming the media to have any real impact on them, 3> are selected from a set of fetish topics chosen by the people who happen to be into those fetishes.

We are inundated with material that is unimportant and does not matter. Really - ask yourself the following:

• Is it important to me, and society in general, what Octomom does? If she makes any decision, will it actually affect me or society?
• Is it important to me, and society in general, whether Jon and Kate split up, or work it out and get their act together?
• If Oprah ever manages to get total control over her weight will society be the better for it? Will I be the better for it? What if Oprah continues to have weight issues, will that actually affect my personal health and well-being?
• Will my life change if it turns out Michael Jackson was murdered?
• Will my life change if Madonna adopts another baby from Africa? Will my life change if Angelina Jolie's lips grow wings and fly to Mars?

The questions above are rhetorical - the answer to all of them is "No". Increasingly, though, the media is portraying these events not as novel trivialities for sake of amusement, but as if they are somehow important. Somehow, Octomom's behavior raises issues that we need answers for. This is all just posturing by the media in an attempt to get more eyeballs - invent a bit of controversy and you get people watching.

I write all this knowing it will not change anytime soon. This like this happen when humans have built-in desires and proclivities that someone figures out how to exploit. It's like sugar, we have a built-in drive to consume it that developed during the 99% of human existence when food was incredibly scarce and hard to acquire. Now that sugar is easy to get, it's nearly killing us and as a population we cannot seem to stop consuming it. There is something about human behavior that clues into these things that did not develop when information could spread as quickly as it does now. In order for this sort of thing to change it must introduce an evolutionary disadvantage to those with the proclivity versus those without it. That disadvantage must impact successful propagation and continuation of the species. So, if worrying about Octomom's behavior means you never leave your house and therefore mate, well then maybe those who don't care will be the ones who lead us into the future. Or maybe fixating on Jon & Kate will cause a culture to ignore an invasion from a media adverse third world country that storms in and kills us all. I don't see those outcomes as very likely. I keep thinking of the movie "Idiocracy" that asserted the stupid people just have more kids and edge out the smart people, so in a couple thousand years we are inevitably headed toward a world of TV-addicted morons (dumb movie, but some of the humor in it is pretty funny).