Channel tunnel mindedness

Another thought on why marketing and comms folk get soooooo hung up on the individualist way of seeing mass behaviour:

We’ve grown up looking at people through the pipelines of the media – as little folk sitting at the end of the TV or radio channel. Whether its a big audience or small, it’s made up of little individuals, individuals who are all looking our way (they’re using the medium after all). Far from the medium being the message as dear old Marshall had it, the audience has been hidden by the medium – as we peer down the tube at them, we’ve not seen that they’ve got other things to do in their lives but consume the media as a preparation for consuming the products advertised in the media. As if that has ever been the nature of human lives….

(BTW I think this is where the ’emotional engagement’ nonsense that the US industry has embraced is really revealing – key supporters of the combined agency-advertiser-research agency initiative are media owners. It makes things seem as if there’s a media-attention centred heirarchy within media which is now being restored…emotional engagement rather than just atttention…so now we can go back to lobbing things down the channels and hoping they’ll do the job)

Let’s think of these media instead as windows perhaps: we can see some of their life and they can see some of ours. But far from all of it or even the important bits….

Think this builds turbo-s Faris’ brilliant transmedia planning idea…