It’s the economy, stupid

American Media critic Jack Bratich has warned operations like this bode for a new era of foreign policy driven by partnerships between the state and the corporate world of unprecedented reach and intimacy; a marriage made in social media.

According to Noam Chomsky, this has been the American media business model since 1917. But the capacity to take this model to the people, and make them make it work, certainly is novel. And this is why I get asked about media power so much these days. People are thinking about it more because it's something they experience. They live it more. Recently SBS' Insight, featured a bereaved father who was forced to use some of the time he should have spent organising his daughter's funeral to monitor Facebook trolls hell-bent on desecrating her memory. Not social media's fault; but also not possible without them.

So, do we worry too much about social media? No. Should we have been worrying about the issues social media raise long before Mark Zuckerberg took his first computer science class? You bet. History tells us that 'social media' is a misnomer. When researchers studied teen cinema audiences in 1920s America, they found that young audiences didn't really care what was on the screen; the cinema was one of the few places where they could hang out with each other, away from the parental gaze. Since then, audience researchers have consistently found that media users always want to feel as if they are a part of a community. These same scholars have also warned that there are dangers in outsourcing social well-being to business interests. So, the challenges faced by Prime Ministers, elite cops or simply grieving parents trying to find a little peace are all testimonies to the hazards of living in times when significant aspects of public welfare lie in the hands of people whose business is not public welfare, whatever the marketing speech of sharing.

The current level of interest in news about social media shows that Australians understand this, but whether this understanding leads to change in the public interest is another matter. As social media come under increasing pressure to demonstrate their economic value, the prospects don't look good.