A Media Golden Age?
Adapting for today
When I was young, seemingly every tiny town and big city had at least one newspaper, and those newspapers were often hyper local focused.
My high school years were spent in a really small place, but we had a newspaper. And I was in that newspaper quite a bit in those years. Not as much as those who were exceptional at sports, but lots nevertheless.
I’m just an example though, like countless millions of other high school kids at that time.
And people trusted newspapers then. Really trusted them. When my High School graduation came around, the newspaper listed all the kids in my graduating class. They forgot me. Having read that, my mother, at least for a time, was absolutely convinced that I was not graduating, despite my assurance to her that I was, and the school’s assurance to her that I was.
People don’t much trust the media anymore. That’s probably a good thing.
You know who else was in the newspaper?
The Kiwanis, the Eagles, the Rotary, the Chamber, and yep, the Masonic Lodge.
Time changes. Most people, in most places stopped reading newspapers, and newspapers died all across the country.
As an adult, when I first started working to get people elected to political office, newspapers were extremely important. One could live or die by the press coverage, by the Editorial Board.
By the time I stopped doing that sort of work a few years ago, newspapers had lost all of their power. There was absolutely no point in trying to court them, for no one was reading what they wrote anyway.
Media has changed radically, in a very short time.
Television news, newspapers, even the 24/7 news cable channels, don’t command much at all anymore. The stuff we knew is largely dead.
But that doesn’t mean that media is dead.
It simply means that media has radically changed. Successful media is online first, not infrequently online only. The formats it takes are much different than the formats of the past. But it remains, thrives even.
Today it is very rare to see a Masonic Lodge in a newspaper for a positive reason. Very rare to see a Lodge on TV News. It happens, but not often. When it does happen, the impact isn’t all that great, for people have moved away from these traditional formats in droves.
Yet still, as a Craft, a need to get our message and information out does remain.
So, how do we do it?
How can our Lodge, indeed how can we as individual Masons, get our message out in this new media environment?
It can, I think, be argued that we are in a Golden Age for media. How can we make it work for Freemasonry?
I’m hopeful we can discuss that here.
Let’s chat about it in the comments below…
By finding platforms like Substack, that are not algorithm driven, or are less driven, I believe we can get our messages out to a larger group of people than by using Facebook or like places. We can reach as many or more readers in a simpler way. The key to sharing our messages though is the same everywhere, we have to be dedicated to sharing.
Technology fails as impressive as it looks these days looming, glittering with AI and towering over a digital mental landscape, but the first nation to deploy a truly military approach with an EMP is going to theoretically render all of that completely meaningless, all that billions of tech undone with one zap. But people have mouths and people have ears and if all that global connection was undone, still people would talk about things. If you’re feeling a bit like a Luddite, and you’re tired of the electronic mirror in front of you endlessly sending out streams of information like ironically I am doing now, you can always engage a conversation with someone and suddenly get that delicious biological rush where the human is talking to the human and meaning begins to matter.
It’s great that everybody can express themselves electronically and I can talk to someone anywhere in the world (depending on their government,) but we are heard (har har)animals and that’s what we like, where our empirical biological senses are bouncing sound waves back at us from vocal cords and skin is vibrating from the clasp of a handshake and nerve endings are sending complex streams of information from simple contact, allowing those delicious neurotransmitters to dump their dopamine into our systems from the greatest computer of all, the human brain. Technology has its place but human beings like any building always go back to the temple or building foundation, the basics, the baseline.
It’s good that we can reach out electronically, but I think it’s even more important in order to revitalise the human that is inside the theoretical human mobile mast, the inner man needs to become the outer man, especially the kids these days they need to reconnect and learn how to have actual conversations without typing and lowering their head without making organic eye contact. No wonder so many kids are nervous and scared because they don’t understand social interactions these days and we need to make an effort to show value in organic connection.
Those conversations which also might go a long way to having these youngsters realise the value of feeling confidence and carrying on an esoteric tradition like our noble craft, which ultimately seeks to make good men better. Reigniting the flame of human creativity can be something you do electronically, but organically you connect with people on a deeper level and you spread the fire of your message to the kindling of eager ears. Technology is great and has its place but it must not become wrecknology.