I've been talking with people recently about the increasing popularity of ‘long-form’ internet chat shows and wondering:
a) why
this is happening and
b) why so much of the really interesting political and
philosophical content is being produced in America. As far as I can tell, there
are very few British equivalents (although I’d be delighted if someone pointed
me towards something which would disprove that assertion).
I'm not sure why this seems to be the case, but there
are, I think, a couple of ‘broad brushstroke’ observations that could be made. Perhaps
because of the way the nation had to win its independence, the American psyche
seems more readily tuned to notions of intellectual freedom, particularly to
ideas that might, broadly speaking, be described as iconoclastic and /or
libertarian (although I realise that these days that, in itself, might be seen
by some as a pejorative term). Americans have a positive concept of citizenship
which –generally speaking- makes them less inclined to trust centralised
authority.
By contrast, many British folk see themselves as subjects.
Our psyche seems more readily tuned to deference and I think this applies as
much to institutions and political parties as it does to class. Perhaps as a
result of the conditions which prevailed during and after World War 2, our political
discourse seems more likely to be framed within implicitly statist concepts and
notions. Indeed, some of these have become such articles of faith that many folk
appear to be unaware that there might be other ways of thinking about them. To
take two obvious examples: Start a thread on any social network questioning the
sheer wonderfulness of either the NHS and /or the BBC and you’ll soon encounter
something very close to cult-like behaviour (by that, I mean an unwillingness
to consider the possibility of any deviation from received views).
I only have an outsider’s superficial grasp of American
mainstream media, so I won’t comment on the failings which are causing people on
that side of the Atlantic to look elsewhere for nourishment. In the UK, the
mainstream channels persist with the pretence of impartiality, a notion that permeates
a lot of news content like a bad smell. Just occasionally, political debate
‘red in tooth and claw’ is allowed to break out, but generally speaking, the quality
of discourse is dismally shallow.
It is inevitable, once consumers start noticing
this, that some will decide to shop around. The popularity of the so-called ‘intellectual
dark web’ has come about because people are rejecting the orthodoxies and pieties
of the mainstream media, demanding instead content which treats them like
adults and which recognises that every story contains degrees of nuance. They want discussion that isn’t stale and managed; they want debate
which doesn’t banish some topics to the realm of the forbidden.
With the mainstream media unwilling or unable to provide
such a service, some consumers will naturally flock to platforms which allow real
conversations, unmediated by spin, to take place between real people. The popularity
of these alternative outlets is evidence that there is, after all, an appetite
for serious discussion about complicated ideas.
But don't expect mainstream journalists to do
anything about it. They haven’t even noticed that the television might
be broken.
