Media Opinion South Africa

A cultural watershed moment in the media

Sometimes there is a glitch in the matrix where the limitations of the old operating system are laid bare and something new pokes through. Today I find myself part of a group that opposes the dominance of identity politics, political correctness, partisan politics and the establishment in higher education and the news media.
A cultural watershed moment in the media

To be concerned about the risk of offending. People today are moving further and further away from what thinking is and are merely reciting scripts, I have said this about ideas but when it comes to social issues, I think it is more concerning.

There have been cultural watershed moments where the old way of thinking has come across the new. Where archetypal ideas with layers and layers of meaning were dismissed because mainstream media and those who dictate it just do not have the time and the intellectual depth to get the complexity of discussion. Everything is summarised into bite-sized content pieces that make for headlines and soundbites.

The annihilation of TV as we knew it

I believe this is why TV on demand, YouTube and podcasts are slowly killing television as we know it. A large percentage of the population that consume mainstream television is going to consist of those that cannot afford access to the alternatives.

Television by its nature relies on forcing a story and from a distance it easy to see the blind spots. If there is no room for open conversations about topics we view differently without conflict, we are in serious trouble.

The instabilities of the time we live in are worrying. The further away we move from having real conversations, the closer we will find ourselves in turmoil. Things go wrong in cultures all the time, the polarisation increases until people start to act it out.

The mainstream media is based on an old dying model that is being replaced by new media and new technology so quickly that its faults are becoming glaringly obvious. Fortunately, thanks to YouTube and podcasts information is not filtered, allowing people to engage more and assess in-depth topics. My question is not when mainstream media will be replaced, but who and what will replace it.

Breaking away from the old

There are so many people trying to find ways to have serious and equally dangerous conversations that are completely ignored by the mainstream. What is uniting this new group of thinkers is that they sense that the chaos that is unfolding now is an attempt to find new ways of doing things and its nearly all happening online.

About Lwazi Piti

Lwazi Piti is a PR ICT and B2B consultant with over four years experience. He started off doing consumer PR and Communication, consulting for a broad spectrum of clients. He spent a year working on a Multinational National Telecommunications client, Angola Cables, which helped him find his niche - tech. Currently, he is working as a Senior Account Executive on at WE Communications, working on a South African mobile communications company, providing voice, messaging, data and converged services.
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