Bless you, my Lord Murdoch.. Bless you…
Your average peasant walking around feudal Europe did not spend their lives going, ‘you know what? This system sucks’.
On the contrary, they were pretty much incapable of seeing the world organized in any different way.
The Feudal Lord owned everything and left you, the peasant to work their land and take what they deigned to give you.
And that was that, at least until the rise of capitalism.
Today, only 2% of the population works the land, so we don’t spend a whole lot of time gleaning the fields, but we do spend a lot of time watching media.
And the global media system is set up the way land distribution and wealth and power were set up in feudal Europe.
Everything is pretty much owned by a tiny percentage of the popuation and they decide what the rest of us will get to see or hear or read or think, pretty much.
The system is so feudal in fact, that we readily accept the idea of inhereted power and wealth.
Of course James Murdoch should succeed his father and run News Corp. Of course Arthur Sulzberger Jr should succeed his father and run The New York Times.
Of course.
How else could the world possibly be organized?
We, the poor peasantry who own exactly nothing should be happy to have our small hovels, our iPads and iPhones and tug at our forelocks and say “bless you” for making our miserable lives possible.
This notion of electronic feudalism permeates all aspects of our global culture.
We sit at home and spend a mind boggling 5 hours a day watching television that is provided to us by the feudal lords of Time/Warner or Comcast (now Comcast/NBC/Universal where the son has also succeeded the father), or a tiny handful of other media giants. We are the passive recpipients of their largess. They decide what we shall see. Our job is to watch whatever they provide, and then buy the products that their advertisers offer. Gleaning the fields.
If you happen to live in Bangla Desh, the world’s image of your country is rather poor.
It is rather poor because the only thing the rest of the world gets to see about Bangla Desh is when a flood or famine or war or disease strike that country. Then the media lords will deign to spend the money to send a crew to cover the disaster. Otherwise – nothing. So if one says ‘I am going to Bangla Desh for a vacation this summer’ they would seem crazy. If someone says, ‘I am thinking of investing in Bangla Desh’ – likewise. Bangla Desh is screwed. They must wait for CNN to deign to send a crew and then it is only for the worst of news. A continual downward spiral.
My friend Gary Younge, a correspondent for The Guardian is in Israel this week and has written a great piece about the Palestinians in the West Bank.
I have spent a fair amount of time both in the West Bank and Gaza.
I have long believed that the best thing the Palestinians could do is to get their hands on a thousand video cameras or 10,000 video cameras and simply start telling their stories (well) over and over and over and flood the blogosphere with their own personal stories. Nothing more.
Blowing up Israeli cafes or schools or homes is not going to change a thing. But the truth will.
If only they could sieze the media and take control of their electonic lives.
But this requires a different kind of thinking. The technology is here to do this.
But the product must be perfect. And continual.
Can the peasantry rise up and take control of their own lives?
The technology is very much here.
The events in Tunisia and Egypt and now Syria are just a tiny taste of what is possible.
A tiny taste.
Random, scattered yet incredibly well watched videos on Youtube posted by ‘amateurs’ are also just a foretaste of what is coming.
But we can do better than cats in trees and we can do better than raggedy video of the Syrian army shooting at civilians – compelling though they are.
We can learn to focus our content. To produce it well. To compete at a much lower price point. To take control of our digital lives.
The first step comes with education.
Educate yourselves to create quality. Then, get it out there.
Arise peasants.
You have nothing to lose but your lives spent watching Cupcake Wars.
