Media Mythologies

Media Mythologies in the Platform Age

Are the public well served by the media? An argument for the negative.

By James Travers‑Murison

 

This essay analyses Barry Lowe’s Media Mythologies of the 1990s, sees how true his predictions and theory are in 2025 and injects a measure of satire into the intellectual debate on where the media is taking us—and who, precisely, is in control.

 

Old prophets, new temples

Marxist social scientists once claimed the media was the ideological mouthpiece of the ruling elite, sowing false consciousness in the minds of the masses. That thesis later met its apparent alternative: the Gratification theorists (Katz, Blumler and Gurevitch) who insisted the audience was not a herd but an active chooser, selecting media to gratify needs. Semiologists followed, warning that symbols do not merely “say” things; they do things—quietly, persistently—beneath the surface of choice. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model captured this elegantly: communication is not a straight line, but a circuit in which messages are produced, encoded, interpreted, resisted, and re-made.

Back in the 1990s, Lowe offered a phrase that remains oddly durable: a “cyclical transferal of ideas” between media and public, a loop in which each side insists the other is the source of the attitude, and therefore neither side feels responsible for changing it.

Lowe’s loop: the media as a brake, not an engine

Lowe’s most unsettling proposition is not that the media mirrors the public, but that it stabilises the public: it acts as a brake on the expansion of ideas. In outpouring its concepts and stereotypes, it shapes the public’s attitude; the public then demands “more”; the media, believing it is serving tastes rather than manufacturing them, reproduces the stereotypes in ever larger volumes. A cycle of stagnation is created in which the media becomes a conservative force, not because it is philosophically conservative, but because repetition is profitable and repetition is safe.

The cycle breaks only when saturation arrives—when people become so exhausted with “the same” that they refuse to consume it. Only then does the media, in a desperate bid to restore ratings (and profits), attempt to evolve.

From broadcast to streaming: “no ads” does not mean “no influence”

The twentieth-century media economy, at least in its simplest form, was an advertising economy: the programme was bait; attention was the catch; the audience was sold. That does not vanish in the age of streaming. It mutates.

The first mutation is obvious: large parts of contemporary screen-life occur in environments where advertising is absent or at least less visible—subscription streaming is the most conspicuous example. Yet “no ads” does not mean “no persuasion”; it often means persuasion is embedded rather than interrupted. Product placement returns in modern dress. Sponsorship becomes atmosphere rather than announcement. The platform itself recommends, queues, nudges, and autoplays—an editorial hand disguised as convenience.

The second mutation is subtler, and much closer to Lowe’s thesis. We have not escaped the cycle; we have subdivided it. Instead of one large public receiving one large broadcast, we now have millions of micro-audiences receiving micro-feeds. In place of a single cyclical transferal of ideas, we have innumerable personalised loops—each one small enough to feel like “choice” and constant enough to feel like “truth.”

The algorithmic thousand-island dressing

If Lowe’s era was dominated by the media baron and the advertising cohort, ours is dominated by the platform and the recommender system. The theory that best complements Lowe today is not simply “propaganda” but what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism: an economic logic that claims human experience as raw material for extraction, prediction, and behavioural influence. The point is not merely to advertise to the public, but to model the public, segment it, test it, and reshape it—quietly—through feedback.

Tim Wu, in The Attention Merchants, describes the long campaign to harvest and resell attention as the defining industry of modern life. The media no longer merely provides content; it provides a machine for capturing the user’s next minute—and then the next hour. The loop is automated. The cycle runs while the citizen sleeps.

And thus the “mixed economic sandwich” gets a new condiment. The old sandwich was materialism with a thousand-island dressing. The new sandwich is the same, but the dressing now learns your palate.

YouTube, TikTok, and the age of the niche tribe

YouTube is not simply a “channel”; it is a meta-broadcast system with a recommendation engine that can concentrate attention and create niche publics at scale. The political consequence is not only persuasion, but sorting. People do not merely adopt a view; they increasingly inhabit an information habitat.

The evidence on “rabbit holes” is contested—and that contention itself matters. Large-scale audits have found patterns consistent with user migration from “milder” to more extreme ecosystems in certain sub-communities, while also highlighting limits and complexities in how recommendations operate. Other studies argue the popular image of an algorithm that relentlessly funnels mainstream viewers into extremist content has been overstated, or varies significantly across time, topic, and policy regimes. Systematic reviews tend to converge on a cautious conclusion: the recommender system can facilitate pathways to problematic content for some users in some contexts, but the simplistic “automatic pipeline for everyone” story does not withstand scrutiny.

TikTok intensifies the logic of the loop through frictionless, high-velocity feeds: less searching, more receiving; less deliberate selection, more induced appetite. Facebook Groups add yet another layer: not merely consumption, but communal reinforcement—micro-societies that develop their own status hierarchies, in-group language, and moral panics, while experiencing the outside world chiefly as an adversary.

The American divide: from mass audience to hostile publics

The contemporary political divide in the United States cannot be reduced to social media alone; but it is increasingly difficult to discuss it without discussing platform dynamics.

One axis is misinformation and distorted incentives. Allcott and Gentzkow’s work on fake news consumption during the 2016 election framed the problem as an economic and behavioural market: false stories circulate where they are rewarded, and attention functions as currency. Another axis is ecosystem behaviour. Network Propaganda argues that at least one major segment of the U.S. media environment developed a distinctive feedback loop in which ideological consonance is rewarded over correction, producing a system that differs in structure from the rest of the landscape.

In that context, niche channels do not merely “serve the public.” They cultivate antagonistic publics—mutually unintelligible, permanently offended, and increasingly confident that the other side is not wrong but evil.

Influencers, “legacy media,” and the shrinking commons

A further complication is that mainstream media increasingly competes with creators, streamers, and “news influencers.” Pew’s News Platform Fact Sheet shows that digital devices are now the dominant way Americans get news (with very large majorities using smartphones, computers, or tablets). Pew has also reported that around one-fifth of Americans regularly get news from social media influencers. The role of gatekeeping—once an editorial function—has been redistributed across personalities, platforms, and engagement metrics.

This does not necessarily mean “legacy media is dying” so much as that the shared public commons is thinning. The centre does not hold because it is no longer one room; it is a thousand rooms with locked doors and personalised wallpaper.

Participation media: we now live inside the conduit

Lowe wrote as though media was something you watched, read, or endured. The basic fact of the 2020s is that media is now infrastructure.

The citizen cannot simply “turn it off” because the screen is where life occurs: banking and accounting; planning the day; shopping and delivery; streaming, gaming and messaging; maps, bookings and payments; news and sport; and increasingly, work and civic participation via Zoom, Teams and other meeting platforms. The mobile phone, tablet and laptop are no longer optional tools but the default interface for employment, services and social coordination. In this sense, media is not merely a set of institutions; it is the operating system of everyday life.

Sherry Turkle’s critique is relevant here: when devices sit on the table, conversation does not simply continue unchanged; it becomes thinner, safer, and more performative, because attention itself is under negotiation. Yet other scholars insist the digital sphere also enables genuine community, accessibility, and new forms of civic participation. This tension matters: media today is both a solvent and a scaffold.

Conclusion: Lowe is not irrelevant—his loop has become programmable

So where are we left? Still in the pluralist democracy, still chewing the “mixed economic sandwich” of materialism pervading—ham, lettuce, tuna and avocado piled high—yet now the thousand-island dressing is not merely poured on; it is optimised.

Lowe’s cyclical transferal of ideas remains useful, but it requires an update: The cycle is no longer a broadcast loop between “the media” and “the public.” It is a computational loop between platform metrics and user behaviour, endlessly refined. Advertising still matters, but influence increasingly arrives through recommendation, habit, community reinforcement, and identity performance—sometimes where ads are absent and persuasion is embedded.

Big Macs still pop up and fly across our computer screens as we try to delete them, like the huge herds of wild bison across the plains of precolonial America; but the bison are now tagged, tracked, predicted, and herded by invisible fences, near impossible to remove and targeted to our subliminal desires. And the media barons—together with their advertising cohorts, their platform engineers, and their influencer retainers—may indeed be prisoners of their creations – the dreaded algorithm. Yet that does not console the public. It simply explains why the tide does not recede.

 

Author

James Travers‑Murison (LLB, BA, DipEd, DipJourn) is a lawyer and writer and President of UOCA. He has worked in reporting roles, including a stint at The Canberra Times and Optus Cable Community TV, has published in the CCH Equal Opportunity Law newsletter, and has authored two books on his grandfather’s travels in Asia.

 

Endnotes

1. Barry Lowe, Media Mythologies (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995).

2. Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch, ‘Uses and Gratifications Research’, Public Opinion Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1973): 509–523, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2747854.

3. Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980). A commonly used copy is available at https://spkb.blot.im/_readings/EncodingDecoding_HALL_1980.pdf.

4. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

5. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019). See also: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy/.

6. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Knopf, 2016), https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/64/.

7. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (London: Penguin, 2011), https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-filter-bubble-9780141969923.

8. Manoel Horta Ribeiro et al., ‘Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube’, Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’20) (New York: ACM, 2020), https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351095.3372879.

9. Mark Ledwich and Anna Zaitsev, ‘Examining YouTube’s “Rabbit Hole” of Radicalization’, First Monday 25, no. 3 (2020), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10419/9404.

10. Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, ‘Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 2 (2017): 211–236, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211.

11. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Open access edition: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/28351.

12. Pew Research Center, ‘News Platform Fact Sheet (2024)’, https://internet.psych.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/532-Master/532-UnitPages/Unit-05/Pew_NewsPlatform_2024.pdf.

13. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2015).