You can’t understand November’s election — or America itself — without reckoning with how our media attention has shattered into a bunch of misshapen pieces.
- Think of it as the shards of glass phenomenon. Not long ago, we all saw news and information through a few common windows — TV, newspapers, cable. Now we find it in scattered chunks that match our age, habits, politics and passions.
Why it matters: Traditional media, at least as a center of dominant power, is dead. Social media, as its replacement for news in the internet era, is declining in dominance.
What comes next: America is splintering into more than a dozen news bubbles based on ideology, wealth, jobs, age and location.
- This means where you get your news, the voices you trust, and even the topics and cultural figures you follow could be wholly different from the person sitting next to you.
- So instead of Red America and Blue America, we’ll have a dozen or more Americas — and realities. This will make understanding public opinion, and finding common agreement, even more complex and elusive.
Disclaimer: No, this doesn’t mean The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or CNN are dead. It just means their influence will wane with most people in the other bubbles. Nor does it mean Facebook and Twitter will lose relevance. They simply will be influential in tighter bubbles.
To help get your head around this shift, we’ll generalize in describing some of today’s most powerful bubbles (which are of widely varying sizes). We talked to influencers left, right and center; media executives; political operatives; C-suite executives and more. What we found:
By Jim VandeHei, and Mike Allen
