Welcome to the Show: Audience Capture
Shared knowledge is disappearing as the world seems to be growing more and more niches for people to occupy. Not that this is anything new. There have always been corners of the world that didn’t interact with each other. The difference now isn’t that it’s cultural or geographical anymore, but rather relies on people’s interests and individual identities.
A school is a citizen factory. Not only is it meant to provide students with what they require to survive in the world, but it’s also there to put everyone on the same plain. That’s to so, everyone generally ends up having a shared knowledge. Depending on the century or even the decade, what this shared knowledge entails can vary greatly. If one was educated and lettered in the 19th century, you can bet that they knew a lot of Victorian literature along with a heavy dose of the Biblical. It would form part of their everyday language. Of course, the students themselves bring their own bits and pieces into the mix as well. To say that schools succeed on this front is, of course, not even worth debating because they are human run institutions and the best way to make something go sideways is to add a human in charge of it, let alone ten.
Shared knowledge is evaporating in the public spaces. Instead, you can find it among fandoms, followers, and audiences. It forms less and less a part of the day to day of how we go about our lives, and instead resides in our private identities. And here comes the problem. Audience capture.
When a podcaster, influencer or public intellectual finds that vein that they can mine, they often don’t let up. Audience capture is a negative feedback loop between a voice, shall we say, and the people who listen to that voice; the former keeps delivering on topics with which the latter can agree with wholeheartedly. Once the podcaster or influencer has found what a core audience will repeatedly respond to, then they can just keep on hitting on those points and milk them for all the currency they have.
I say currency, because it’s not necessarily about money. Hell, it can even be brownie points for all that matters. Falling into a pattern of content creation that relies on fulfilling the wishes of a dedicated portion of an audience is intellectual and creative death. It could be fake, as in someone putting on a show, or perhaps the phony starts to believe the hash that they’re trying to sell is actually good.
Christopher Hitchens wrote of George Orwell that he was a man who never ceased to take his own temperature, i.e. that Orwell was always vigilant to see whether his positions were not only truthful to what he believed, but that there was a possibility that he could be wrong about every one of them.
How many artists and thinkers don’t push themselves or their thought because they’re too worried to upset their audience? Probably most. I’d put the argument forward that there is only one audience member anyone should worry about, and that’s the creator. A writer’s first audience is him or herself. A musician’s first pair of ears would be their own. An intellectual should be arguing against everything they believe long before they bring the argument to their opponents. No straw-men, only steel-men. Under audience capture a writer would become overly sensitive to any sort of criticism. If one corner agrees with you wholeheartedly and only sing your praises, when a bit of criticism or even polite, neutral disagreement comes your way, you’d fall apart. A bit like a child who is lead to believe by their parents that they are special and better than anyone else only for the rest of the world to reveal to them that they are as a matter of fact not any of what they’ve been told. And for a lot of people that’s what they try to avoid. Call it being a snowflake, but quite often people making the complaints about how sensitive people are are in fact parroting the memetic quotables from their favorite pundits.
So, how to push out of this audience capture or to prevent it all together? For one, you could have no audience. Now, there’s two ways of going about this, in my opinion. One; don’t ever do anything that other people could like. If no one is listening to you, then you don’t have to worry about what you have to say. Be rude, attack people, block ’em, whatever. You’re free to say what you want since no one is bothering to hear a single word you have to spit out. However, the second way is to realize that an audience is something abstract. It doesn’t really exist. You could look over a sea of a thousand people singing the same song and realize that they are all individuals (somewhat absurd, I know). They have more in common than those things that divide them, but at the same time, the differences are enough that no artist or thinker could say that anyone individual thinks or feels or experiences things the same as any other. Therefore, when an author writes for themselves, they will not reach everyone, but they will reach people who are similar to themselves.
A second aspect to avoiding this is to deliberately search out those things that challenge you. This isn’t simply about disagreement and debate, but also about pedigree. Alex Jones and Jimmy Dore, for example, can’t hold a candle up to the likes of Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro. Same thing can go for being an artist. The likes of Bob Dylan and Metallica have lost members of their audience over time and won over more as they went along. Not everyone is gonna be there for the entire journey. Nor should they be. How well someone is considering what they are saying is important. Have they found the one thing that they can do over and over and just milk it, without having to change or search themselves, or are they always reacting to what they have done, looking to complete the picture as best as they can.
A common problem with academia is that it’s filled with people who know a lot about very little. A proper Old Testament scholar could write three or four tomes on a single book of their field of study, as an example. That’s not necessarily bad, as this is the nature of expertise. Very specific, but somewhat pretentious and pedantic knowledge. But audience capture resembles this as well, except that the knowledge in question is often held by people who aren’t all that bright and don’t understand that they need to do as Orwell did and take their own temperature from time to time. One of my favorite bullshit lines is ‘do your own research’. Well, have you ever asked yourself are you up to doing your own research? Plenty of people believe a lot of utter bullshit because they did their own research their way and if you disagree with them then you probably just didn’t understand what they were explaining to you.
A tremendous amount of this held knowledge breaks down into a sort of tribal sphere, which isn’t neat, because often they overlap like Venn diagrams. Transphobic-Republican-Grinder-user would tick a lot of seemingly incompatible boxes, and the same goes for bored, white, Pasadena housewife who doesn’t want to be called a racist but probably doesn’t feel too comfortable with a black neighbor despite voting Democrat. Taste in music, participation in fandoms, this niching out is all over the map. And the mainstream has vanished. It’s given up on being a few things to be a multitude, each one fighting for their place in it. The waters have quickened and people are looking to get to higher ground, even if that means not only stepping on others to get there, but on their own beliefs and well-being.
Most people are probably too distracted with everything that’s going on in their lives to have the opportunity to sit down and think about whether what they are doing is best for themselves. Money has to be made. Kids need taking care of. You don’t want your romantic life to shatter into a million pieces. You and your friends are there for each other. Oh, and you’ve gotta keep up with the latest developments that the pundits, thinkers, influencers, musicians and artists you admire and follow tell you that you should care about.
Audience capture isn’t a new thing, but with better and greater means of communication in this current age of the internet revolution, it’s certainly picked up not just speed but also potency. Morality and ethics come into play here. How much can you fool your audience? Will you test them? And what of yourself?
I don’t think anyone can be faulted for doing something for money. Much of what’s presented as serious debate is probably more of a show. It’s all entertainment. That’s something George Carlin said during the last two or so decades of his life. He took nothing seriously anymore. He didn’t care. When you’re born, he said, you get a ticket to the show; when you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.
