A New Media: Changes what is made vivid, personal, and immediate

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This is one reason why the media is so complicit in many of the issues of the day... they take concepts that were previously abstract and relentlessly make them vivid, personal and immediate. It amplifies the risks around us and easily sells us on a cycle of dissatisfaction.

If you want to create action on the important, figure out how to make it vivid, personal and immediate.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/01/misjudging-risk-and-bad-...

This ties into a broader point about the power of the media- it's not generally in the telling us what to do (or whom to vote for) but in what we care about.

The problem of the media is what it gets us to care about, and the cure of a democratic media is making the things that truly matter to people's lives vivid, personal, and immediate. (To some extent. That still scares me a little.)