Frankfort School critics feared monopoly control of the source by nation states or monopoly capital. Benedict Anderson focused on control of the channel, newspapers and radio, and their contribution to creating the imaginary community that is a modern nation state. Later, cultural studies shifted focus to the receiver, resistance to one way communication, and the reframing of the message as it is received. The last point is one to which evil genius Republican strategist Frank Luntz draws attention with his remark that, “It’s what they hear that counts, not what you intended to say.” That reminds me of another evil genius, Joseph Goebbels, and the importance of “the big lie.” That points me, in turn to “the big idea,” the Holy Grail of those who, like myself, who work in advertising or PR. Which brings me back to the channel. The greatest single concerns of professional propagandists these days are channel multiplication and audience fragmentation. In the age of print and radio, the audience was largely local, and national media reached an elite with a relatively homogeneous education and worldview. TV enabled political candidates and their handlers as well as advertisers for other sorts of products not only to speak directly to consumers in their living rooms but to make the message more compelling with moving images and music. Still, however, bandwidth was limited. With the number of major networks limited, getting your message to as many constituent/consumers as you were willing and able to pay for was a doable proposition. Cable TV and the Internet have changed all that. The importance of the geographically local has diminished with audiences now scattered all over the world. Conversely, however, audiences are now more fragmented than ever, with the endless choices available enabling individuals to see and hear only what they want to, a process that Eli Paliser now sees being driven to an extreme by “helpful” algorithms that threaten to have us all in “filter bubbles” of our own.

What ethnography can contribute to our understanding of this situation is an interesting question.