Simplified strategies that can be condensed and packaged into soundbites spread into society’s collective conscious and accepted wisdom far faster than nuanced, complex ideas under the economics of today’s media. While the clamor for heuristics, stereotypes and easy answers isn’t new, if we demand thoughtful discourse and nuanced answers can we reshape the economics of media?

I’m less interested in Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” than I am over the actual debate over the concept.

If you want to dig into the debate over the concept, check out the salvos from Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Seth Godin and Mark Cuban, and then dig into the more balanced takes on the debate from Mike Masnick, Valeria Maltoni, Alan Patrick and Michelle Greer.

Put the debate over “free” aside for a moment, I simply I won’t be able to do it justice better than Masnick, Patrick or Maltoni; I’m more interested in the debate itself and how “strategy by soundbite” wins in mass media.

The demand for answers crowds out great questions.
It’s impossible for everyone to understand every part of every debate: heuristics and stereotypes are a fundamental necessity for people to process information and create knowledge. Information overload is not a new issue; in fact, as individuals we have always lived in a state of information overload even though as a society we find ways to adapt to higher levels of data and increased rates of transmission throughout the world. Supply and demand change to establish new equilibriums between content and context.

But what do these equilibriums represent? Easy answers? Generalized strategies misinterpreted and mistakenly adopted as best practices and winning tactics? Do great questions lie unasked and unanswered in perpetuity, lost to the annals of history?

Polarized positions pay, nuanced thought loses.
Patrick, The Free Market for Snake Oil and the Age of Unreason:

The lesson for the future is obvious. The truth may out, but if its not populist it will need a frigging great megaphone to have a hope of being heard.

Right now, as far as I can see, in the New Media Age there is a big risk that the Age of Reason is slowly sinking, and we are entering the Age of Unreason, as the (largely unfunded) forces of Right drown in a sea of (largely commercially funded) snake oil.

I’m not convinced this is a new dynamic in the New Media Age: even though the distribution of megaphones remains highly uneven, does the simple fact that more megaphones are available and used increase or reduce the amount of snake oil in the world?

My comment:

I was thinking about how there always used to be inaccurate information spread within social groups, but since it was hard to dip into those groups we couldn’t “see” or “hear” about the inaccuracies and faulty logic; but now we can. I always try to think about if the behaviour is truly different, or if we’re just now more aware of what’s always existed.

I’m not sure; but I have little doubt that true reason is a difficult strategy for mass media to pursue. In an era where traditional printed media struggles to be the best way to aggregate and distribute news and analysis, how many printed media outlets reach a wide audience and are financially successful using strategies based on reason, discourse and non-polarized positions?

Can a shift in demand reshape the economics of media?
When easy answers sell, polarized positions become good business strategies and nuanced thought loses out.

But need these always be dominant strategies?

Technological change creates cultural change; the changing technology behind media and communication is obvious, but less obvious is how technological change has forced society to re-consider the role and meaning of media in our world. As our relationship to media changes, is there any wonder that we are confused over how to define a “journalist”, a “photographer” or a “professional”?

Can cultural shifts create more enduring changes than technology? For example, if we demand more nuance, more love, more discourse, more thought and more authentic value, can humanity reshape the economics of media?

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Updated July 16th: A nuanced take on “free” by Bill Gurley (thanks to Tom Armstrong for the pointer).