The medium is the message (and often a weapon)

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The medium is the message (and often a weapon)

Each new communication technology arms an elite with a way to seize power

James Breiner

Jun 12

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You’re reading the Your News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.

The Word — civilization’s spine

The rise and fall of our communication technologies often mirrors the rise and fall of civilizations. For tens of thousands of years, human beings passed along knowledge and culture only by word of mouth — fragile, fleeting, and rooted in their community.

In this newsletter I’m going to talk about how communication technologies have shaped our world.

First the written word, which empowered a tiny elite
Then the printed word, which democratized information and drove political revolutions, science, and globalization
How print helped touch off the “Columbian exchange” of people, products, plants, animals, and disease between Europe and the Americas
My own experience visiting historically important sites in the Americas
The emergence of mass media — from newspapers, to radio, to TV
The globalized media world driven by the internet

Writing first emerged around 5,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, an incredibly recent development in the history of our species. A tiny minority of monarchs, scribes, priests, and administrators used it to concentrate their power, issue edicts, levy taxes, raise armies, praise gods, and enrich themselves. (Chinese script first appeared later, around 3,200 years ago, and Mayan script around 2,200 years ago.)

Then 500 years ago, the printing press changed who exercised power. In the Western world, individuals could suddenly access knowledge from anywhere, independently of church or crown. A flood of new ideas reshaped religion, science, politics, and economics.

People could define their own identity and their own role in society, not the one imposed by church and state. Literacy democratized information—at first in Europe. And this touched off a series of violent political revolutions in the 1700s, in France, the American colonies, Ireland, and Haiti.

The Americas meet the Word

Print media also shaped how Europeans viewed the lands and peoples of the Americas. Two of Charles C. Mann’s books show how that first contact between two worlds triggered massive upheaval—and how communication helped justify conquest.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus tells the before;
and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created tells the after.

Europe’s first major global expansion wasn’t just about technology — it was also about narratives. Missionaries, explorers, and merchants brought a sense of divine entitlement, viewing the Americas as a Promised Land.

Mann’s books show how the best and worst of human instincts led to enormous innovations in food production, global trade, science, and technology. Those innovations — and some quirks of history — helped Europeans create massive wealth and prosperity on the backs of enslaved Indians and Africans.

Superior and inferior beings

The natives that the Europeans confronted in what we call New England referred to themselves as the People of the First Light, in the land facing East.

Mann wrote, “Time and time again Europeans described the People of the First Light as strikingly healthy specimens. Eating an incredibly nutritious diet, working hard but not broken by toil, the people of New England were taller and more robust than those [the Europeans] who wanted to move in—’as proper men and women for feature and limbes as can be founde’.” — 1491 (emphasis mine — JB)

On the other hand, the Indians often regarded the Europeans as their inferiors.

“As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they tended to view Europeans with disdain as soon as they got to know them. The Wendat (Huron) in Ontario, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed ‘little intelligence in comparison to themselves.’ Europeans, Indians told other Indians, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain smelly.” — 1491 (emphasis mine — JB)

The newcomers rarely bathed, in contrast with the natives, who frequently cleansed themselves in the rivers and lakes.

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Two versions of history

I had a ringside seat on the rewriting and re-interpretation of history in the runup to the 1992 Quincentennial observance of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas.

What his voyage touched off has been called the Columbian Exchange — massive movements of people, animals, food products, manufactured goods, and ideas both ways across the Atlantic.

Historians of the period tend to fall into one of two camps, Mann wrote.

“On one side are economists and entrepreneurs who argue passionately that free trade makes societies better off—that both sides of an uncoerced exchange gain from it. The more trade the better! they say. Anything less amounts to depriving people in one place of the fruits of human ingenuity in other places.
“On the other side is a din of environmental activists, cultural nationalists, labor organizers, and anti-corporate agitators who charge that unregulated trade upends political, social, and environmental arrangements in ways that are rarely anticipated and usually destructive.” — 1493 (emphasis mine — JB)

I participated in a lot of the Quincentennial activities with delegations from Columbus, Ohio, which had its own 1992 event. This brought me face to face with these competing visions of this history.

At the time, I visited many of the sites described by Mann, some while working and some as a tourist. In South America, Mexico, and Europe, I could see remnants of both the wealth that the exchange created and the devastation it left behind. Slavery, resource extraction, and forced cultural assimilation built modern consumer societies. Some of those places:

the Amazon basin and the pre-Inca ruins of Tiwanaku in Bolivia;
the monarch butterfly reserve and the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan in Mexico;
the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador;
and the cities of Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain that profited from and managed the markets for slaves, cotton, textiles, sugar, coffee, tobacco, potatoes, and maize (corn) that the Americas provided to Europe in exchange for iron tools, horses, and other products.

Mass media change the world again

It was in the 19th century that the printed word became more universally available through newspapers and magazines. The invention of the telegraph, cheaper paper, and high-speed printing presses created a world in which everyone could participate in the news of the day at the same time, all around the world. Mass media created consumer markets for mass-produced products and prestigious brands.

In the 1920s, radio brought the emotional impact of the human voice to millions of people at the same time. Radio carried the excitement of voices describing championship boxing matches, World Series games, FDR’s Fireside Chats, Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, and the explosion of the Hindenburg dirigible.

The result has been described as “the retribalization of society—emotional unity through shared listening experiences.” Listening was active: the listener had to picture things described by the announcer.

Radio was also an effective propaganda tool of the fascist powers leading up to World War II.

Image is everything

Television’s arrival in the late 1940s created a more passive experience. It has been described as “visual spectacle over rational discourse; the world as a performance.” In other words, image is everything.

This helps explain why the television audience of the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960 judged the “winner” based on Kennedy’s composed, relaxed appearance in contrast with Nixon’s, who looked uneasy and intense.

In the U.S. three networks emerged to dominate news consumption and define the patterns of daily life.

(My own experience with brief weekly TV appearances over 10 years confirms the importance of image. Friends and acquaintances would usually comment on my hair, beard, tie, shirt, or suit and have no memory of the week’s business story I had talked about.)

The Internet: decentralized distraction

Now we’ve entered the media attention economy. The medium is no longer just a message—it’s an ecosystem. Infinite content fragments our time and scatters our focus. We can watch a war live while scrolling past ten other headlines.

The currency of exchange is the time and attention that people dedicate to news and information.

In economic terms, we have an oversupply of news and information competing for a scarce resource — people’s limited time and attention. That makes their attention so valuable.

Is it any wonder that every politician and product in the world is screaming for our limited attention? Is it any wonder that people feel exhausted and overwhelmed by the media that envelops them?

But as we marvel at real-time communication, we must ask: who benefits from each new medium?

Final thought: Tools reflect intentions

Each leap in media technology expands what we can say and who we can reach. But they don’t automatically lead to justice, equality, or shared prosperity.

That depends on who controls the message—and the medium. For digital media entrepreneurs, that’s the challenge and the opportunity: to build models that share power, not just content.

From oral storytelling to TikTok, communication tools don’t just carry messages—they shape them, amplify them, and decide who gets heard.

That’s why, for digital media entrepreneurs, the challenge isn’t just to build an audience—it’s to build a system where value flows both ways: from creator to consumer, and back to community.

Let’s make sure our new tools don’t just echo the old inequities.

Next time: Artificial intelligence changes the rules again. It affects what we think, what we say, and how we say it. And like the internet, it’s everywhere, all the time.

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