| The Romans didn’t just build an empire. They built an entire way of life. It allowed them to take their Romanness and export it seamlessly to places as far-flung as Londinium, Carthage, and Antioch. Every Roman city—even newer ones like Colonia Agrippina (modern day Cologne) and Lutetia (Paris)—had a familiarity to it. There was the common language—Latin. A common belief system based on a set of facts that were more or less universally held to be true. A shared canon where the works of writers like Virgil, Plato and Suetonius held sway. The commercial world was possibly even more standardized. There was a common monetary system, guilds that stretched from one end of the empire to the other, a common set of weights and measures. Not to mention established business practices. It all came down to their innate belief in “Romanness” and the notion that Romanness was superior to any other way of being. Until, of course, one day it wasn’t. Europe’s Dark Ages didn’t happen overnight. But gradually, and then all at once, the scaffolding that kept Europe Roman began to disappear and was replaced by a fractured array of untethered ecosystems that lacked the uniformity, and thus the greatness, of Rome. Latin dissolved into Spanish, French and Italian. Germanic languages reemerged in England, Germany and the Low Countries. Facts were replaced by feels. The written word by oral tradition. Rather than vast universities, which lived on in places like Baghdad and Cordoba, small isolated monasteries became the stewards of millennia of wisdom. They were but small drops in a very large bucket, surrounded by an illiterate and superstitious population that did not trust science and medicine. And who did those Romans think they were anyway. And so Europe interregnum, (or post regnum, as the case may be), became a world where authority and order slowly melted away, the powers that be largely helpless to intervene as smaller and smaller groups created their own realities and fiefdoms and attempted to impose them on the people around them. It was a reality so far removed from the brightness of Greece and Rome that the era became known as the Dark Ages. There was no central authority, no one to say how you measured a bushel of wheat. What you paid for it. Or that a wood sprite wasn’t why mixing it with yeast would give you bread. At times one of the fiefdoms would gain some traction, only to run out of steam when faced with the arduous task of centralization. And if you think that sounds a lot like the current media universe, you are not alone. Why It Matters To be clear, we are not yet in the Dark Ages of media. “Yet” being the operative word. But the Vandals have indeed sacked Rome, they’re coming back for more and the defenders are not quite sure they really want to be there. We have, in just a few short decades, fallen far from an imperial Rome of media greatness, the so-called monoculture, where all knowledge was filtered through a handful of highly regarded gatekeepers who kept standards high and output largely profitable. There was an accepted body of knowledge, a clear path to becoming a purveyor of said knowledge and a strong belief in the existence of a multitude of immutable truths. And then this week a self-described “wildlife biologist and environmental scientist” influencer with almost 100K followers on Instagram filmed herself grabbing a baby wombat from its mother, a stunt which it seems will soon have her deported from Australia. Marlin Perkins we hardly knew ye. If only wildlife influencers were the problem. For something like a third of Zoomers, “news” is something they watch on TikTok, delivered by “news influencers.” Said news influencers occasionally having had some sort of journalistic training. What they do have is an audience though, and an innate sense of how to build, retain and grow that audience. Which for many means the modern-day equivalent of telling people that a wood sprite is indeed why wheat can be turned into bread with yeast. Feels, not facts rule the day. Or, as Kellyanne Conway famously called them, alternative facts. And yet… pulling back from political ideology and cute furry baby marsupials, the collapse of the monoculture is a huge blow to anyone wanting to get a commercial message out to the broader public. “Commercial message” being a polite word for “advertising”. In the monoculture days, there were four media types for advertisers to wrangle with: television, radio, print and outdoor. Yes, the barrier to entry was high, but the reward was great—an advertiser could easily reach large swaths of the population at once. The Roman Empire scenario at work Whereas today, media most resembles medieval Europe. With small unconnected pockets of podcasts and substacks and for-profit newsletters, some emulating the Romans, some the Mongol hordes, some completely without any historical context. Access to these media sources is controlled by seemingly magical algorithms, systems that seem as if they’d be as amenable to human sacrifice as they are to logic. With the high priests and priestesses who have figured out how to game them selling charms and incantations to the masses. Press the right button and you too shall walk again. Even television, that most mass of all mass media, is a shambles. Or, at the very least, in disarray. Three stalwart networks became four and then maybe five. Cable happened. And then streaming and now viewers feel like they need a treasure map just to navigate the system. Or maybe just a bit more AI. The TV operating system, which was once limited to an on/off button and a sturdy well-designed dial, is now yet another gatekeeper. Not to mention a potential retail sales tool. Witness all the players seeking to join the fray. FASTs are rapidly replacing cable, yet the ecosystem is nowhere near as elegant—synchronicity and standardization having been tossed out the window as the hobgoblins of little minds. Transparency too, leaving us to intuit the things we once knew for certain. Feels, not facts. Local television once all hung together too, an orderly system based on the national one. Everyone speaking Latin and relying on a well planned system of roads and aqueducts that branched off from the main lines. Only now it is every man for himself with frightened city states fending off advances from digital Visigoths at a time of decreasing relevance, trying to figure out if they’ll be Venice or Ravenna. There’s also no longer a common currency, no uniform system of weights and measures to ensure that your cubit is the same length as mine, your deduplicated audience based on the same data set. Finally, there is YouTube, which may be television’s Holy Roman Empire, neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire, but an aggregator of many things, some valuable, some not, though value seems to mostly be in the eyes of the beholder, ruled by an absentee landlord whose interest, like the Papacy’s, appears to lie in areas where it has complete control, e.g. search. There is another argument to be made too, depending on your view of YouTube, that it is not, in fact, television’s Holy Roman Empire, but rather its Constantinople, the city dubbed “New Rome” that became home to the successor empire, one whose roots were clearly Roman but also so tangled and twisted that “byzantine” became an adjective as well as an empire. It was a place where the truths of Rome lived on—there were roads, there was Latin and Greek, there were laws. And though it held on for another millennium, it never quite managed to equal the thing it set out to be, its roots being far too, well, byzantine, to accommodate a Pax Romana level of order and standardization. Skip ads and all that. What You Need To Do About It And yet, there is hope. For just as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, today’s unkempt media landscape may give way to something more valuable. If there is, I suspect the catalyst for that will not be a Medici, but rather some form of artificial intelligence that can work to create order out of all the chaos, show us that the world is not, in fact, flat, and create a system that is every bit as standardized and user-friendly as the old one, right down to measurement and currency. Without actually being as unbending and hide-bound as the old one. Like the undoing, the redoing will not be a smooth or sudden process, but rather, as a series of fits and starts, while everyone gets back on the same page again and Galileo is burned at the stake. But it will happen—the Greeks were on to something in their belief that history was a neverending loop. Media as The History Channel. READ THE FULL WEEK IN REVIEW — or listen to it — ON TVREV |
