Cultural Pessimist View

• Main arguments of Cultural Pessimist view of the new media

  • Commercialisation and limited consumer choice
  • Undermining of human relationships and communities
  • Lack of regulation
  • Threat to democracy
  • Censorship & control
  • Increasing surveillance
  • Power of unelected commercial companies
  • Problems of the validity of information
  • Cultural and media imperialism
• Commercialisation and limited consumer choice

  Preston: digital media doesn’t show us the media we don’t know that we want to be informed about- news is driven by profits, not people
• Undermining of human relationships and communities

  Replaces the quality in-person conversations with family and friends with online interactions - may lead to people losing the ability to communicate effectively in real life

  • increase in social isolation
  • loss of social capital
• Lack of regulation

  Ofcom has limited power due to global nature of new media
• Censorship & control

  MacKinnon: some undemocratic repressive regimes like China and Iran, monitor and control new media use

  e.g. Great Firewall of China- internet is censored by Goverment
• Increasing Surveillance

  Governments use technologies to track and monitor citizens

  Society turning into a “synopticon” where we are all surveillance each other and policing each others behaviour through “cancel culture”
• Power of unelected commercial companies

  MacKinnon: “sovereigns of cyberspace” - power of giant multinational companies such as Amazon, Apple, Meta and Google to control internet access

  • companies hold power over us that was once held by the governments
  • they exercise “power without responsibility“ (Curran & Seaton)
• Problems of the validity of information

  Difficult to know the source of media messages, therefore difficult to validate information

  • fake or altered in some way e.g. AI “deepfakes”

  + Churnalism
• Cultural and Media Imperialism

  Spread of internet has led to Western culture being imposed on non-western countries

  Western, American, cultural values undermine local cultures and the cultural independence of different societies