Cable Newsing Ourselves To Death: Examining the Connection Between Cable News to Social Media (81213)
Session Chair: Daniel Gilmore
Saturday, 15 June 2024 14:45
Session: Session 4
Room: Salle 269
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
New media forms often build themselves off of their immediate predecessors, but shifts sometimes occur. At the launch of CNN on June 1st, 1980, founder Ted Turner pledged that this first of its kind news network “won’t be signing off until the world ends", in a sharp contrast to the structuring of broadcast television up until that point. Turner’s pledge to build his news network around continuous, 24 hour coverage meant that a new mode of content generation had to be built in order to fill the now unceasing demands of airtime. Ultimately, Turner’s vision of what “the news” could look like won out and this model of an endless churn of material to fulfill an unlimited expanse of consumption space has come to dominate a tremendous amount of our present media landscapes—especially online. What this presentation seeks to argue is that our present era of the internet—the era of social media—rather than taking its cues from earlier forms of the internet, has instead been modeled after the practices and incentives of cable news. Triangulating between Neil Postman’s theories of media’s adaptations to consumption demands and Marshall McLuhan’s arguments about the affordances of media form, the focus here is to examine how the growth of social media eventually led to a present landscape of an internet built on an insatiable engagement engine powered by an unending demand for user generated content and the ways in which that has, like cable news, worked to corrode the quality of these media spaces.
Authors:
Daniel Gilmore, New York University, United States
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Daniel Gilmore is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at NYU in United States
See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule
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