Media Literacy: who did you say loves conflict?

I heard someone being interviewed on radio last week say, "The media loves conflict."

Of course that is not the case. It's the audience that loves conflict, and the media loves anything the audience loves, which is a fundamental principle in media literacy. The audience – people – developed reaction values like conflict, hundreds of thousands of years before the media existed. Mass media, brought into existence by the printing press, just turned those values, called a "reaction package," into a business.

Before media, people on this planet reacted to events around them – exactly the same way people still do – according to the values in this reaction package. There were – are – conflict, progress, disaster, consequence, prominence, proximity (physical and emotional), timeliness, human interest, novelty, sex, sensationalism and curiosity. Additionally, people reacted to changes in their status quo, and also to whatever threatened to change their status quo.

To experience the reaction package at the individual level, the same way people did before media, simply give up all media for one week. No books, magazines, movies, newspapers, radio, recordings, or television, or Internet presentations of same. You will still react to events that happen near you, close enough to see, hear, or feel. The experience will be made most effective by placing yourself in a survival context, in a wilderness, say, where danger – the threat to the status quo – hones your keenness to respond, your reaction package.

The mass media, blasted into being as part of the Gutenberg Singularity, simply created a system for sharing the values in the reaction package. Today, that system lets people share the experiences of people reacting to actual events occurring far away, or fictional events presented as entertainment (such as "Survivor"). People love the system, because it empowers them to experience actual events vicariously, and to be excited by fictional events created to provide that excitement. The media lets people be life voyeurs. Is this the media's fault? People who lack media literacy, like the interviewee on the radio, like to think so. Thus the media comes under attack by people for giving the people what they want.

It's probably time to start putting a stop to this transference of blame. It's probably time for the radio interviewer, one of only about a million media professionals in this country, to correct interviewees when they say things like, "The media loves conflict." "No," the interviewer might say, "it's the audience that loves conflict, as long as the conflict is somebody else's." Audiences long before mass media, in ancient civilizations typified by Greece and Rome, were being magnetized by plays with conflict at their hearts. When Gutenberg needed a book title to market his new machine, he chose a book that laid out the medieval mind's direst question, the conflict between good and evil.

The Bible became a huge player in mass media, and it still is, still the best-selling book of all time, and now, maybe for the first time, presented as the definitive answer to the chicken-egg media question. When Gutenberg introduced the first printed Bible, he could not have done it because the media loves conflict; the media didn't exist. But an audience did. It wasn't long before the audience started to grow, and it dragged the media along with it. The audience is dragging it still. The audience needs to be reminded of that, every time one of its members goes on radio and says, "The media loves conflict." If he's going to shoot the messenger, he's going to have to start with the Bible.