Category: social media

The Media is the Mirror

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August 16, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

Last week I discussed how we deceive ourselves. This week I want to explore how we define ourselves through our affiliation with and membership in groups. Growing up we are part of a family, a group of students in school, congregants at church, players on a team, members of our local community. Many of these group affiliations are endowed to us by our parents, by our circumstances and the institutions within our local community. Later we associate with others of the same profession or job, who have similar political sympathies, or similar interests and hobbies. Are we passive victims of group psychology or do we actively, perhaps unconsciously, seek out groups that will confirm our opinions, values and perspectives? How does the development of different media change the composition of our social groups?

In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills (1956, p. 304) argued that the country was developing from a community of publics into a mass society. What’s the difference? In her book These Truths, historian Jill Lepore explained what Mills meant by the two terms. “A community of publics is a population of people who talk to one another; a mass society receives information from the mass media. In a mass society, elites, not the people, make most decisions, long before the people even know there is a decision to be made” (2018, p. 566). In a community of publics, communication is a two way street. People communicate with their governing institutions and with each other. In a mass society, communication is a one-way street. Centralized organizations communicate to large populations who have little opportunity to respond.

Mass Media

Until the last decades of the 19th century, newspapers, magazines and books did not have a circulation wide enough to be considered mass media. Shortly after the Constitution was drafted, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison published a series of 85 essays arguing for the ratification of the new Constitution. The essays were first published in two New York City newspapers. They were reprinted by a few newspapers in other cities but many Americans would not have read those arguments (Source).They might have heard about them from neighbors or at local meetings where a state legislator revealed those arguments. America was a jigsaw puzzle of communities without any unifying identity.

It wasn’t until the late 19th century that newspapers had a role in shaping public opinion and identity. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer built media empires that competed with each other for readership in several prominent cities (Source). Through their influence on public opinion, they had some indirect influence on public policy. In 1898, the U.S. sent the battleship Maine to Havana to show support for Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain. When the battleship blew up, the Navy initially determined that the cause was a mine, an act of aggression by Spain (Source).

Newspapers published by Hearst and Pulitzer featured hyperbolic headlines designed to stoke animosity against Spain. Did those alarmist headlines, known as yellow journalism, light a fire of public anger so hot that politicians in Washington declared war on Spain? In grade school I was taught that, but the truth is that there were several issues that accelerated tensions between the U.S. and Spain. It is unlikely that the newspaper coverage prompted the war (Source). However, it became clear that large media organizations were willing to shape their reporting of events to amplify public sentiment and attract more readers.

Thousands of newspaper readers riding a New York City subway car to work might be reading the same newspaper. Without being conscious of it, they were part of a group, bundled together and sold to advertisers as part of the newspapers’ circulation numbers. The small amount that readers paid for the newspaper had never been enough to offset the printing and distributing costs.

Broadcasting

On November 2, 1920, a station in Pittsburgh broadcast the election returns. Within two years, there were over 500 licensed radio stations (Source). In 1931, a CBS station in New York City became the first broadcast TV station (Source). By the end of World War 2, the three networks, ABC, CBS and NBC dominated the medium and competed with each other for listeners and viewers. In the 1920s, the Nielsen company began to sample the audience for radio stations. In 1950, they began measuring the viewership for TV programming (Source).

In the 1960s, a popular Top-40 radio station like WABC in New York might broadcast a variety of music that appealed to a wide range of people and musical tastes. Higher audience numbers led to higher advertising revenue.

There were songs from popular musicals, as well as American song book classics performed by artists like Frank Sinatra. There was a mix of rock and roll from bands like the Beatles, some R&B by Ray Charles and the soul music of James Brown. Mom and Dad tolerated the sound of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Who. The kids tolerated old fogey artists like Sinatra and Bing Crosby. People were exposed to a diverse collection of musical tastes played over and over again in rotation. Maybe a 12-year-old mentally tuned out Eydie Gorme’s song Blame It on the Bossa Nova, but if someone mentioned the song or sang a couple of bars, they would be somewhat familiar with the song. The exposure and repetition of this variety led songwriters to incorporate elements from a diverse collection of musical styles. That was AM broadcasting.

Narrowcasting

The rise of FM radio stations tailored a selection of music to a smaller audience. Until 1965, FM radio stations in larger cities simply simulcast what their affiliated AM Radio station played. In 1965, the FCC instituted a rule change that required the owners of AM and FM stations in large markets to broadcast distinct programming on their FM stations. Some FM stations became independent and adopted innovative programming to appeal to a narrower audience. WNEW in New York City played jazz, poetry readings and progressive rock (Source). A person no longer had to tolerate the music that they didn’t like. In fact, a popular artist or song from another genre might be unfamiliar.

Getting Choosy

In the late 1960s, 8-track players for cars became available. Music lovers took one step further to crafting a unique listening experience in their car (Source). People could be less tolerant of what they didn’t like and more in control of listening to what they did like. In the 1980s, people could create an intimate and unique listening experience with the newly introduced Sony Walkman, headphones and compact cassette.

The Internet

In the 1990s, the development of the internet allowed users to explore and share common interests, opinions and perspectives with strangers. By 2000, AOL Online had 20 million users and hundreds of forums, chat rooms and message boards (Source). Users were known to AOL by their real names and addresses but users could hide behind screen names and creative profiles with other users. As consumers of print, radio and TV media, we were anonymous. Through social media we could interact directly with other human beings and preserve our anonymity. Without anonymity, we might be reluctant to express our frank opinion. Behind the curtain of digital anonymity, we became like the wizard of Oz.

Shared Errors

Two weeks ago I wrote that “we come in contact with the world through our senses but we engage with the world through our errors.” As wizards in the digital realm, our anonymity meant that our errors might have little cost. In direct contact with others, we had to learn some restraint. Now we could try out controversial religious, political and social claims without worrying about social ostracization or physical harm.

We could hang out in groups of people who made similar claims. Vaccines were a government conspiracy. The Trilateral Commission controlled the leaders of powerful countries through extortion or mind control. Most of the extraordinary technological and scientific discoveries in the second half of the 20th Century had come from aliens who had landed near Roswell, New Mexico after World War 2. Democratic politicians were sponsored by Communist sleeper cells intent on imposing socialism on America. They were part of a secret cabal of pedophiles. Republican politicians were puppets of big business and the military industrial complex. They would rather spend your taxes on war than health care and social programs.

We found groups and media channels that believed the same facts and came to the same conclusions we did. We could stand firmly on the principle that people should not be forced to buy healthcare insurance. But what about a 25-year-old without health insurance who got injured somehow? Should the emergency room refuse to treat her? We could believe that churches and civic organizations would voluntarily contribute to charitable funds that would pay for that expense. We could believe that and no one would challenge us with facts because we all had libertarian sensibilities and resisted most government programs.

Social media has helped us untie the restraints on our opinions, impulses and emotions. Next week I want to look at how we form and share common rules of morality in groups. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Ramon Kagie on Unsplash

Lepore, J. (2018). These truths: A history of the United States. W. W. Norton & Company.

Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. Oxford University Press.

Me and Not Me

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January 11, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

An infant rests in the crook of his mother’s arm and gazes at her face. The infant may have been separated physically at birth from his mother, but the infant knows no boundaries of self. Fast forward a number of decades. When a parent dies, a child learns that the property of the dead parent forms a new self, a legal entity, that can be party to a contract. This new agent, called an estate, is even given an identification number (Source). This week I want to explore the space between self and non-self. What do we mean by self? I will leave a discussion of Atman, and other mystical variations, for another day.

At first glance, the idea of self seems rather binary. There’s Me and everything else which is not Me, the rest of the universe. But our lives are lived by degrees. We may not feel like the same person we were ten years ago, but our identity remains the same. A person may excuse their behavior by saying they weren’t themselves when they did such and such. Is Me the identity that began on the day of my birth? Does that Me end on the day of my death? That identity is objective. It was recognized by others even when I was lying in my crib and unaware of my identity. I could be lying in a coma in a hospital oblivious of my identity but that identity would persist.

Or is Me the person that experiences change, that acquires and loses abilities and characteristics? That is the subjective perspective. Perhaps Me includes both of these aspects, the objective identity and the subjective experience. As we reach our teenage years we experience an awareness of our presentation to those around us. Integrating this subjective awareness of the objective aspect of ourselves can be emotionally painful.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle built a metaphysics of a unified self experiencing change. He was a nature guy, a philosopher who speculated that things and people in the world behaved the way they did because they wanted to realize their nature. This sense of purpose, called teleology, was the central foundation of Aristotle’s thinking. He thought there was a universal form, an essence that directed a person toward a purpose. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, had thought the essence lived somewhere in the heavens. Aristotle taught that it was within us. Of course, I wouldn’t trust Aristotle to diagnose a problem with my car but they didn’t have cars back in ancient Greece when Aristotle lived.

If I fast forward in my time machine to the late 19th century, I would get a more mechanistic view from the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He thought that if there was any unity of self, it was a fragile union, a lull in an internal battle between the id and superego. The id was our primitive drive for pleasure. The superego was a collection of societal and parental norms that we had internalized. Negotiating the conflict was the ego, who was like a person walking an ill behaved dog (the id) that constantly yanks on the leash (the superego). Aristotle thought that we expanded our sense of self outward to family, friends and our local community. Freud imagined that we internalized our family and society, that we struggled to incorporate their ideals, commands and prohibitions. Somewhere in the space between these very different views of the self we can develop our own sense of what the self is.

The other axis I want to explore is care. Adam Smith was an 18th century philosopher and economist who noted that we care the most about those who are closest to us. We would be more upset by the loss of our own fingertip than we would if a million people in China died in an earthquake. It’s as though caring behaved like gravity, a caring force that grows weaker as the distance between two people increases. Smith wrote a century before Charles Darwin but we can understand how this mechanics of caring helps guarantee our survival. Charities recognize this force in their outreach to the public, and try to bring us closer to the plight of those in far off countries.

We care about ourselves a great deal and this helps our survival. People who are at risk for suicide may have a diminished sense of self-care. Some of us have a grandiose sense of our importance to others, lack empathy for others and seek admiration to reinforce our sense of our own importance (Source). This condition is called narcissistic personality disorder, and yes, it has its own billing code (Source).

Let’s return to that pastoral scene of mother and child. A woman experiences many hormonal changes after childbirth that can make it difficult to take care of herself while coping with the demands of a newborn (Source). Increases in the hormone chemical oxytocin help increase a sense of bonding with the infant (Source). A woman’s sense of self expands to integrate and accommodate the infant’s needs as well as her own, similar to the expansionist model of self Aristotle taught. In his philosophy, the self is directed outwards. His emphasis was on unity of self seeking to fulfill a purpose. He understood that a woman’s nature was to act as care giver and keeper of the household (Source).

Freud, on the other hand, focused on the conflict within the self. The self is not a given as in Aristotle’s metaphysics. It is built from the surrounding society, our family, friends and community. It is built through managing our instinctual urges. Given all that, it is no wonder that a parent, particularly a mother, would have a prominent role in a Freudian diagnosis. In his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes that the dominant explanation for schizophrenia until the 1970s was schizophrenogenic mothering. Yes, ladies, if your kid is a schizophrenic, it’s because you were a terrible mother. A history of such pseudoscientific quackery fosters public distrust in science, yet our modern society is ever more dependent on scientific expertise.

Does caring diminish with distance, as Adam Smith noted? Maybe so. People around the world responded when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for none minutes. Chauvin didn’t care when Floyd protested that he couldn’t breathe. The video and accounts of that incident shrunk the emotional distance between George Floyd and the public. Viewers cared. Around the world, they protested the brutal disregard of life shown in the video. Many believed that Chauvin was an example of a systemic prejudice against minorities. He was the mushroom that pokes its head out of the ground, an indication of a widespread fungal network below ground.

The spread of broadcast, cable, internet and social media has accelerated the expansion of each individual self. We become outraged at the sight of a flagrant violation of basic human rights. Internet networks have evolved to promote rage bait, content that is designed to elicit anger and outrage (Source). We see elements of both visions of the self, those of Aristotle and Freud. We are a bridge between an ancient idea that humans have a natural purpose and a more modern notion that we are a disjointed assemblage of impulses and influences. There is both unification and fragmentation. We are drawn to new experiences yet shrink from the conflict of so many different points of view. To simplify our lives, we contract and consolidate our media feed so that we consume only certain points of view. This Balkanization resists any unified vision, any common agreement of principle, of ethics, of acceptable behavior. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

My Permanent Record

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November 7, 2021

by Steve Stofka

“This will go on your permanent record, young man,” my fifth grade teacher told me. As children we struggle to envision next month. A permanent record sounds like more than a month, for sure. Throughout our lives, we will buy goods and services and interact with others who are strangers. That requires a lot of trust and trust depends on reputation, a permanent record that companies, institutions and politicians work hard to shape. In the thirty years since the dawn of the internet, we are flooded with information, most of which has no reputation. We can only trust the institutions or people that relay that information to us. How do they build their reputations?

In Carlsbad, New Mexico is a series of one hundred underground caves that forms the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. During a tour, the guide turns off the lights and visitors stand in total darkness. Our vision dominates our navigation through the world. Without it we gather in other data, the sound of a throat clearing, the scuffle of a sneaker on the path through the cavern. We become aware of the musty smell of water trickling down through the rock and the smell of bodies nearby. We may notice the sound of our own heartbeat or pay attention to our toes inside our shoes.

Then the guide turns on a flashlight and we turn our heads to notice whatever the beam of light falls on. We notice the ripple and folds of rock, the different textures and colors of that one spot which the flashlight beam illuminates. How quickly we brush aside all this other sense information that we were just experiencing. Several visitors remarked on this phenomenon. Most of us organize our world primarily through sight.

The screen on our computers or phones is our attention flashlight. Through a series of algorithms Facebook, search engines and social media have learned to tune that light to our interests, our values, what we treasure and what is a threat to us. What engages our emotions or enrages our sensibilities? What music, clothes, activities do we like? They learn our habits and preconceptions, then feed us information that fits those preconceptions because they want us to linger. Just don’t go away, they say. The algorithms don’t care whether capitalism is good or bad, Republicans or Democrats, whether hip-hop is better than soul. All that matters is that we watch the screen and shine our flashlight on the nearby ads. Our attention is the product.

The Industrial Revolution spurred the need for standardization, for the making of products and machines with interchangeable parts (Mass Production, 2021). Human labor is not easily standardized so the task itself must be standardized so that human labor can be harnessed to the task. Generalization leads to specialization and this makes people more productive (Heilbroner, 1997, 80). More productivity leads to higher wages and greater consumption.

Beginning in the 19th century, mass marketing grew into a powerful tool when TV gained wide popularity after World War 2. Media outlets had vague information on the tastes of their audience but ads were a scattershot approach to reach consumers. The advertiser’s message would often fall on deaf ears because the advertiser didn’t know much about me, my unique combination of tastes, my interests and desires. They promoted their products and services, their reputation.

The media giants now have a permanent record of my attention history and buying habits. My unique combination of preferences has been sliced and diced into standardized characteristics that are important to an advertiser. A giant corporation becomes like the proprietor of a general store in a small town. They know my opinions, the news I read, the sports I like and the shows I watch. This digital reputation has become my permanent record.

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Heilbroner, R. L. (1997). Teachings from the worldly philosophy. New York, NY: Norton & Company.

Mass Production. (2021). Retrieved November 6, 2021, from Scholastic Grolier Online. https://go.scholastic.com/content/schgo/D/article/100/031/10003161.html

Social Brain

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February 7, 2021

by Steve Stofka

On C-Span’s Washington Journal call-in show, I  heard a caller say that they were glad to see the government back at work. The show allows callers to briefly say their peace. Roughly half of the people in this country don’t want the government in Washington to work, half do. Because of  the show’s early morning airtime, callers in the eastern time zone are overrepresented and most are mature. Regardless of one’s political affiliation, most appreciate the show’s unfiltered approach.

The Greek philosopher Plato observed that we are social creatures by nature. Each of us has the capability of reasoning – it is the distinguishing feature of human beings – but an individual walks around in a cloud of misperception. Only through dialog with our neighbors do we arrive at some universal truths.

Indoctrinated since childhood in an egalitarian, individualistic society, we reject this “group think,” but the founders of Facebook and Twitter have made billions creating a social platform for us to interact. Whether we unfriend a family member on Facebook or engage in a spirited debate with a stranger on Twitter, we are demonstrating the Platonic notion that we try to arrive at truths in our dialog with others. The Social Dilemma documentary explores the techniques of manipulation by those who wrote the code.

Some people hate capitalism. “It turns people into numbers!” We don’t think of money as a dialog. Bitcoin is worth $40,000 or it is worthless. The marketplace is a dialog. There is a group of “investors” on Reddit who are one-share owners of the volatile stock GameStop. One share. When one investor sold his shares – he had much more than one – he missed the sense of community with others. Yes, he had made several hundred thousand dollars, but he felt as though he had betrayed the community by selling.

We are human beings with big brains, but our fundamental character is that of individuals in a monkey troop. We assess danger by looking at our neighbors. Are others afraid or is it me? This berry tastes good. Has anyone else gotten sick eating it? We may choose to isolate ourselves from the group, but we don’t like to be isolated by the group.

In Star Trek: TNG, a race of cybernetic beings act as a hive of bees, a collective coordinated in thought and action. They convert U.S.S. Enterprise Captain Picard into a Borg member to communicate with other humans. Picard must endure the withdrawal of the Borg implants and never fully recovers from the psychological wounds of being part of that collective.

Plato’s take on this process is different. We communicate with and understand the world through the group. We are like the Borg in that sense, a collective of creatures, whose distinctive feature is their reasoning. We are intrigued by the social life of bees and ants, who use chemical clues and dancing to inform their fellows about the world.

Bees dance. Ants share chemicals. We dance by talking and writing, by tapping on our phones. We aren’t sensitive to pheromones, so we wear clothes and adopt lifestyles that signal our position in the group. In the new world of tech and social media, the chemicals we share are our data: what we ate, what we bought, what our moods are.

What do Plato and social programming engineers at Facebook have in common? We are Borg. We form a social contract not because it is convenient but because it is in our nature.

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Photo by Boba Jaglicic on Unsplash