For major protests today, it is standard to have a media strategy. For example, there can be individuals assigned to media liaison. The location and timing of an action can be chosen with an eye toward media schedules. Some actions are designed specifically to attract media attention.
However, there are many factors that complicate activist efforts to reach the mass media. Major outlets choose what to report based on news values such as conflict, prominence and proximity. A politician will be quoted rather than an activist, and a scuffle at a rally will be reported rather than what the protest is actually about.
Activists can try to sidestep the mass media by using social media. Another option is simply to not worry so much about media coverage and focus on making actions meaningful for participants. After all, protesters are part of the audience.
There is lots of practical advice on how to send the protest message, and it is definitely worth understanding media dynamics and taking them into account. However, protesters will nearly always be at a disadvantage when trying to compete with dominant groups. A useful perspective for understanding this challenge is provided by Tim Wu in his engaging book “The Attention Merchants.”
Capturing attention
Wu tells the story of media in an original way, as a struggle to capture the attention of audiences. What you pay attention to is the foundation of your reality. It is what you think about, and it shapes your behavior. According to Wu, the history of media is an evolving effort by governments and corporations to capture the attention of audiences.
Wu starts with the first newspapers. They were sober, expensive and not widely read. Then a U.S. entrepreneur had the idea of running advertisements, lowering the price and increasing circulation by running stories of scandal. The result was hugely popular. More people read newspapers. Their attention was captured by lower quality reporting and then directed to ads.
This same pattern was repeated with each new media form. It’s hard to believe today that when radio was introduced in the United States in the 1920s, it was thought improper to broadcast ads that would be played in people’s homes, which were considered private domains. But then a popular program, Amos ’n’ Andy, began airing ads, breaking the barrier of politeness.
Governments also used media to their ends. The British and U.S. governments pioneered the use of propaganda during World War I to promote patriotism and recruitment into the army. The Nazis in Germany learned from this when developing their own propaganda.
However, it wasn’t only governments that learned from the success of World War I propaganda. Advertisers adopted some of the same techniques.
Wu tells of wave after wave of new attention-gathering media, including television, desktop computers, video games and smartphones. In every case, advertisers have shaped content and use, with the trend being to degrade the content to attract audiences and reduce costs. For example, it is expensive to produce quality television, and some producers came up with the idea of having unpaid actors. Reality TV was born, and it was a great hit.
From the point of view of activists, the dilemma is that nearly every media form is captured by advertisers, who are highly sophisticated in designing ways to entice viewers. Today, they have invaded the most intimate parts of people’s lives via the smartphone. When you use Google or browse the web, the ads follow. On many sites, there is “click-bait”: intriguing stories with headlines designed to increase the likelihood that you will click on them and read further, including the associated ads.
In this marketplace built around attention capture, activists operate at a severe disadvantage. They may be perceived as just one more group competing for attention, but without a multi-billion-dollar enterprise to back up their efforts. Media entrepreneurs and advertisers can hire the best psychology, media studies and marketing students to figure out ways to promote their interests. Their efforts are most effective when audiences are influenced without even thinking about it. Many ads are designed to sidestep rational assessment.
This picture would be relentlessly depressing except for one countervailing process. After a new media form captures widespread attention, usually there is a popular backlash as consumers instinctively resist the exploitation of their time and interest. So, periodically, there have been efforts to push back against saturation advertising. In the 1800s, billboards and other public advertising took over cities such as Paris. This eventually led to protests and to laws restricting such advertising.
Recent types of resistance are the use of ad blockers on smartphones and the popularity of Netflix, where viewers binge on several episodes or even entire series in marathon sittings without watching a single ad.
Activists are, for the most part, small players in the struggle for attention. They seldom can afford high-profile ads, and mass media coverage usually lacks an in-depth treatment of issues. Relying on social media means competing with vast numbers of other messages.
Another problem is that most people do not understand how they are influenced by media. They think ads influence other people, but not themselves.
What to do?
One response to this situation is to figure out ways for helping more people to become knowledgeable about the operation of the media and the activities of the attention merchants. Organizers could add segments on media dynamics to sessions on nonviolence training. But more is needed, beyond the ranks of activists.
More broadly, to make a difference in the long run, we need campaigns to educate media consumers about how they are being manipulated and having their attention sold to advertisers. Fostering a movement to run such campaigns is a huge challenge.
In the meantime, individuals can try to resist attention merchants on their own. However, collective action is more promising. Members of groups can support each other in turning off intrusive media inputs, installing blockers or refocusing attention on sources to achieve long-term goals.
How this might be done is a work in progress. So far, attention merchants have taken most of the initiatives, with audiences either welcoming or resisting their offerings. Activists usually try to compete for people’s attention, but do this at a severe disadvantage in skills and resources. This is why they should consider joining a struggle at the receiving end. The goal: developing people’s understanding of attention-capture techniques and building their capacity to resist and redirect their attention.
Make lightweight, inexpensive, portable, colorful, education booths, with handles at each end of the booth, so people can easily carry it.
Then the booth can be carried around an area where an event is going on, and moved when necessary. Booths could be made with PVC water pipe, cheap and thin home paneling, and each surface covered with clear plastic to keep the posters and leaflets (and cheap paneling) from getting wet and dissolving. Clips or something could keep leaflets from sliding off while the booth is being carried. Some of the pipe joints would need to be pinned, rather than cemented, so the booth could quickly be assembled and disassembled, and carried around in a car. Gaffer’s tape (like temporary duct tape) could be used for the rest of the booth assembly. Probably the booth needs to have a pole with a pennant on a corner of the booth, so its easy to spot the education booth in a crowd, so its easy for people to point it out and direct people there to get more information. It should be narrow enough to be carried on a sidewalk without blocking the traffic going in the other direction.
The booth carriers could focus on watching the crowd motion and deciding when they need to move the booth. A third person could be the talker and focused on spotting interested people so they could tell the carriers to stop for a minute. Ideally the carriers would walk slowly enough so bystanders would have enough time to glance at the booth and express interest, before it passed them by. The booth should have a big sign “Interested? Ask us to stop so you can take a look.”
The image that comes to mind is similar to a sedan chair, except its an education booth, with educational materials, that’s being carried around by 2 porters. Big events could have multiple booths, such as one about the point of the event and a more general booth about resisting being controlled by the mainstream media. The booth staff needs to have good people skills and common sense to reduce the chances of the booth being trashed. The booth needs to be light enough so when necessary the carriers can easily run with the booth.
The key issue is that 5-word hand-carried signs won’t educate the public, and few people will approach a protester and ask them what is going on. Also, many protesters are so amped on adrenalin that they won’t do well at coherent and persuasive speaking. Resistance isn’t going anywhere without being more effective in educating the masses and then motivating them to take action in their own self-interest.
Most issues can be boiled down to negative impacts on the bottom 80% of society. For instance, locking up black people in prison is bad for white people because prisons are crime incubators and waste money that could be spent on education and economic stimulation for everybody. Focusing on self-interest will be far more effective in mobilizing masses than idealism will. While idealism makes a pretty (and necessary) cherry on the ice cream sundae, the main driving force in massive mobilizations will be self-interest. This won’t ever happen until the myths about self-interest are replaced with truths about self-interest thru a lot of education.
Part of accomplishing this education about self-interest will be face-to-face discussion, ideally with supportive supplementary educational materials and meaningful visual displays. An easy way to carry these materials to the masses is to carry them around in portable education booths.