Meta-messages and the Internet
Stories are how humans make sense of the world
For a while I’ve been obsessed with this question: Is it just a coincidence that increasing societal instability – political violence, conspiracy belief, left-right animosity, etc. – has tracked the rise of the internet?
It’s not news that Americans are divided between red and blue, but it’s striking how extreme it’s become. In a recent University of Virginia Center for Politics poll, 78 percent of Trump voters and 75 percent of Biden voters said they strongly or somewhat agreed that “Americans who support the [other party] have become a clear and present danger to the American way of life.” All surveys should be taken with a grain of salt, but this finding isn’t an outlier and, regardless, it would take an entire salt mine to make it anything but alarming.
There’s been extensive discussion of the growing hostility in politics, but despite its significance it remains under-explained. Where did it come from? What’s causing it? How can it be reversed? And what does it mean if it can’t be? Over three posts – this is the first – I’ll take a crack at answering these questions.
Political scientists like Alan Abramowitz, author of The Great Alignment, and Lilliana Mason, author of Uncivil Agreement, have offered a socio-political explanation for our increasingly bitter political divisions. This theory says the sweeping societal changes of the past 70 years – the civil rights movement, women’s rights, the expansion of the welfare state, immigration from Latin America and Asia, LGBTQ equality, and rapid changes in religious practice – sorted American voters into two starkly different coalitions:
The blue coalition, which is younger, urban and suburban, racially and religiously diverse, and ideologically progressive.
The red coalition, which is older, rural and exurban, white, Christian, and increasingly reactionary.
The blue coalition welcomes these societal changes as important progress, while the red coalition views them as a rejection of traditional values and a diminishment of their status.
This analysis is right-on and essential for understanding today’s politics, but it’s not enough to explain the level of hostility. To develop a fuller theory of why politics is now shot-through with enmity it’s helpful to think about today’s world through the lens of stories.
Humans make meaning out of our existence with stories. They’re how we define and understand ourselves, our communities, and our countries. In the United States, our defining national stories are so familiar we know the big themes by heart: a government of, by, and for the people; a free country where everyone is created equal; one nation, indivisible. (That the traditional American narrative leaves out massive swathes of our actual history is not incidental, and I’ll come back to it in future posts.) These stories have been told and re-told across decades by presidents, mayors, and other civic leaders. The retelling kept them front and center in national life, reminding Americans of the principles and values that unite us.
In the second half of the 20th century these stories reached us primarily through the media, which in most communities meant one or two local newspapers, three television stations, and a handful of radio stations. Nearly all these pre-internet media outlets offered stories – news and programming – with centrist, unifying, pro-business themes and meta-messages.1 This is significant and it’s important to understand why the old media ecosystem produced safe, centrist content.
Consider a thought experiment: imagine you run one of the three TV stations in your area in 1985. Maximizing return on investment means earning the largest possible market share, and to do that you have to win the attention of 35-40% of everyone in your region – without upsetting your advertisers. How do you do it? In the context of a media market with a small number of competitors (TV or print), the way to maximize the size of your actual audience is to maximize the size of your potential audience. You do this by offering content that’s safe and unobjectionable because it appeals to values and preferences that are widely held.2 The other station heads and the publishers of the local papers have the same incentives, so every media outlet ends up offering a similar flavor of centrist, unity-inflected stories in the form of news, features, and TV shows.3
A lot of safe, broad-appeal news and programming reinforced the ideas of the American story: the country belongs to all of us, we all have a stake, and we’re in this together. Generations of popular TV shows like Happy Days, Family Ties, The Wonder Years, and more,4 as well as newspapers and local and national TV news programs, delivered a consistent meta-message of decency and unity among good Americans. This was the narrative air we breathed for the 50 years between World War II and the rise of the consumer internet in the mid-1990s.5
The key insight is the uniform production of this kind of content wasn’t an approach designed by some central entity, it was an emergent phenomenon of a complex system. It resulted from media business executives, using the latest information technologies, responding rationally to their incentives in the pursuit of profit. It happened to be that the optimal strategy before the internet was to produce news and programming that was safe, centrist, and tended to reinforce what we can call the unity meta-message. This unity meta-message was a dominant story in postwar America through the end of the century.
Another feature of the pre-internet media was that everyone consumed it in the same window of time. In his classic book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson called daily newspapers “one-day bestsellers”; the paper was only valuable for a day so that’s when people read it. Similarly, the six o’clock news and prime time TV were only on when they were on, so everyone watched them at the same time. Because there were just one or two local papers and three TV stations, as each person was reading or watching they knew their neighbors were, too. In a tangible sense, people consumed these stories together, and this element of community ritual reinforced the unity meta-message of the content.
I am not saying the media ecosystem was great before the internet. It wasn’t. It was terrible in many ways, including that it was run by a small group of white elites and it excluded voices and perspectives outside of a narrowly-defined mainstream. It led to a monoculture that left many people feeling alienated. The newspaper- and TV-dominated postwar media ecosystem was profoundly flawed.
It is also the case, however, that the same old media system incentivized content that reinforced themes of commonality and unity, which primed Americans for behavior and rhetoric conducive to societal stability.6 The benefit of this to the country is impossible to measure, but we can get a sense of the magnitude of its impact by looking at what happens when the dominant cultural story, the primary meta-message, changes.
In my next post, I’ll dig into the incentives that produce the meta-message of the internet media ecosystem.
Notes:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300207132/great-alignment
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/232489/imagined-communities-by-benedict-anderson/
Google’s definition of meta-message (noun) is: “An underlying meaning or implicit message.”
If, instead, you offered niche TV shows and covered political candidates outside the mainstream, a slice of your audience would likely be thrilled but most of the rest would be uninterested or irked. (A strategy of targeting niche audiences increases in efficacy as the number of competitors increases.)
I first learned this from Ben Thompson’s Stratechery newsletter.
I’ll come back to the fact that most network TV shows were overwhelmingly white, which is relevant to this larger transformation.
Of course there were also books, movies, music, and leaders telling very different stories over this time period. I’m focusing on the largest part of the area under the entertainment and news normal distribution curve.
That there were stretches of significant instability in the postwar years – especially around the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War – doesn’t undermine this argument. Rather, it emphasizes the importance of the unity meta-message to keeping events from spinning out of control.