“Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube that could be heard over the whole land - I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used.”
Søren Kierkegaard
There are as many ways the world has changed since the 1800s as there are paths of inquiry.
Technology, livelihood, work, leisure, and even the primary concerns of the human mind have gone through great changes and transformations in the last 200 years.
In this sense, it would be rather odd to search for inspiration for a relatively modern phenomenon through literature that was written during this time. Still, the object of today’s article shall do exactly that.
Although existent only in a prototypical form, media was a subject of great interest to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The development of the first iterations of newspapers in Copenhagen has prompted him to address this change at length, and not in a very positive way.
To everyone who is alive right now, media has become ingrained in the day-to-day realities of our lives. Of course, we’ll get our information from news outlets and opinion sources, where else would we be getting it? Hell, you’re even doing so by reading this very article.
However, what stood out to Kierkegaard, during this time was the sinister, impersonal, and anti-intellectual character of this cultural institution, one that he saw as profoundly damaging to the substance of human civilization.
Now, 100-something years after his death, media has evolved in ways that were unimaginable in the past. Social media, atomized information, worldwide access, and lightning-fast transmission are all characteristics of this neo-media that addresses us every single day.
And, in the light of the massive waves of misinformation, radicalization, and abject rejection of reason, I find it justified to not only revisit Kierkegaard’s analysis of media but to also re-apply his rationale to today’s world and seek to understand what the effects of this system of information really are.
Perhaps we may find some rather disturbing revelations down the line.
Kierkegaard’s Observations
During the historical period in question, the volume of newspapers in Copenhagen and all of Denmark has increased significantly. As the consumption of media became more and more widespread, the first effect of interest that prompted Kierkegaard’s concerns was the accessibility of publishing.
In other words, everyone with sufficient financial means could develop and own a newspaper, with no intellectual scrutiny behind it. As opposed to academia, information was not to be judged by its coherent and sound logical structure, but rather by its appeal to the larger audience.
Topics such as personality gossip, which Kierkegaard himself was subjected to, lived on sheerly through their appeal as entertainment objects. However, despite there being no presupposition for them to be taken seriously, their effects on public perception were still severe. Satire and ridicule act greatly on the dignity and respect we offer others, and they also play into perception.
In the case of Kierkegaard, a few run-ins with a local satirical newspaper have caused great damage to his public image, his ability to go out in public, and his overall sense of belonging to the community. This prompted him to see the amplification effects of media as creating a pile-on effect on the subjects of the discussion.
And, because the course of transmission was from one to many, it was rather difficult for one to defend one’s self against media critique, justified or otherwise. In this sense, media created a disproportionate power dynamic, in which any newspaper owner could generate serious public discourse on topics or people, without any scrutiny or checks and balances.
Kierkegaard saw the newspaper and media as a whole as highly derogatory, not only to people or topics but also to human communication. Whereas the usual ways of socialization included face-to-face, direct communication, media proposed a different path.
In an individual discussion between two or more people, there is regard on both the speaker's and listener's sides for who is on the other side. The discussion is personified, judged, and scrutinized by all participants, and it is tailored to that specific situation only. However, media involves a way of communication that is highly impersonal.
For one, newspaper outlets do not necessarily address a single person, but rather a mass of people, a group that is expected to take the role of mindless listeners, incapable of true engagement with the information. This group is to be referred to as the audience, and it makes the object of a separate critique that we will explore a bit further.
But the essence of this critique is the normalized and deeply consolidated power dynamic in information transmission: the newspaper speaks, and the audience listens.
And, more often than not, the audience takes what is being said for granted. As such, the paradigm becomes that in which unqualified information providers produce and distribute ideas and opinions, and the masses consume this information by virtue of it simply being there.
Lastly, belonging to this amorphous, fundamentally non-existent entity called the audience, or the public, has severe implications for how people relate to information. The audience is akin to the bystanders at the scene of a car crash. You stay around, following what is happening, not because you may derive any real value from what is happening, or because you could help in any way.
You lay around and you consume the information of the crash because it is there, because being a viewer who does not have any stake involved in the events occurring is fundamentally entertaining. No matter how grim this may sound, it is an ingrained part of how humans perceive aesthetics, or rather anti-aesthetics in this case. Theatre, grim novellas, and true crime documentaries all are part of this category.
As such, Kierkegaard saw the members of the audience as those who renounce any agency on that which is observed, engaged with, condoned, or condemned. As part of the corpus of the public, one engages with information as what it was intended to be: an object of entertainment, and nothing more. The audience member renounces intellectual scrutiny or ethical consideration because it is not the side of the brain that is being addressed.
Rather, certain opinions, instances of denigration, or damaging ideas are assimilated through osmosis and prolonged exposure to media in this form. In Kierkegaard’s writing, it is this relaxed and latent attitude of the audience that is most concerning about media.
Of course, his observations are not to be taken at face value. Like most philosophers of his time, Kierkegaard was highly egotistical, and being the subject of media denigration did not add lightly to his perspective on the matter. Still, I believe that his observations demonstrate certain fundamental truths about media systems that we, as media participants, should have in mind when browsing socials or reading the news.
Neo-Media and Its Consequences
Since Kierkegaard’s time, the media has seen a tremendous transformation. The hegemony and monopolistic dominance of newspapers have mostly come to an end, making way for what many refer to as democratized platforms of information: social media.
Although we still read the news and would go for something like The New York Times, rather than Fox News, most of our exposure to these outlets also happens on social media. The articles that are being put in front of us, the videos, images, memes, and texts that we see, all fall under the new reign of social algorithms.
Instead of one-to-many communication, we now have a peculiar many-to-many style, in which we can all submit information for exposure, but only those pieces that appeal to the public are picked up and distributed further. In this sense, access to media publishing has become even greater than during Kierkegaard’s time.
This is both worrying and joyful. Joyful, because we now have voices that have not previously held a platform due to political or economic considerations. People of colour, the LGBTQIA+ community, the disabled, and other marginalized communities now have the means to tell their stories and engage with the people who are unaware of their struggles.
Worrying, because the level of intellectual scrutiny of the information we consume has also fundamentally decreased. There is no qualification needed to become a social media influencer, and simply because what you are saying is logically flawed, it does not matter. If one’s ideas are appealing and aesthetic to a certain group of people, in spite of their otherwise damaging character, they will gain momentum and propagate.
This dynamic, I think, demonstrates a fundamental flaw of this system of information, namely the advent drive to stereotype, denigrate, and assume, based on snippets of information that have gone viral. Unlike in Kierkegaard’s time, today’s denigration is no longer about individual people, but rather about social archetypes.
A statement about a group of people, differentiated via race, gender, economic class, or other devices, bears an inherent moral charge about its underlying social archetype. In other words, the post can nudge the audience into thinking the archetype is good or bad, and this nudge may be assimilated with varying degrees of success.
During the year 2016, in the midst of the immigration crisis in Europe, the anti-immigrant sentiment was on the rise throughout all major countries. And, although the matter itself was one of collective identity and nationalism, the media has played a very detrimental role in this campaign. Certain instances, such as one incident of rape that happened, or an armed robbery conducted by immigrants, were amplified and distributed further and further, while the more positive news was kept under the rug, as it did not possess the same entertainment value.
As a consequence, some people only saw those pieces of news related to the immigrant crisis and formed their opinions on the social archetype of the immigrant as violent, misogynistic, uncultured, and uneducated. They were not going to go after that particular person in Berlin that they’d read about, but they would apply caution and reluctance when dealing with immigrants in the future. As of 2023, the ramifications of these media campaigns are still felt throughout Europe.
Just like in Kierkegaard’s time, there was no opportunity for self-defence. The archetype of the immigrant could not have magically responded to these allegations, and even if it did, it did not matter. News and viral posts are not objects of reason, but of entertainment. The initial reaction, in most cases, determines the outcome.
Furthermore, the same power dynamic applies today, albeit in a different fashion. Now, it’s not only news outlets that can tell us what to believe and think, but the dichotomy of the influencer and the consumer still perpetuates the same mechanism. They speak, and we listen and nod. And, due to the nature of algorithmic distribution and selection, the pieces of information that are to be served on our plates are most likely radicalized and extreme, not moderate.
This ties into another important point made by Kierkegaard about media: it is highly subjective, no matter what we want to believe. One reads a particular newspaper and not another because one wants one’s perspective to align with that of the newspaper. One wants to feel heard, for one’s opinion to be endorsed and amplified to a million others. They want their identity to be acknowledged and respected, be it as equals or as superiors. And one will carry out any due diligence, such as sharing, liking, or forwarding, that ensures this visibility.
Media is a game of subjective voices and appeal, not of objectivity and hearing both sides. We borrow realities from the people we listen to, and we build our own identities through the experiences they share. This, I think, brings this topic closest to the definition of mental degeneracy.
The Modern Audience - An Addendum
Ultimately, I find that Kierkegaard’s critique is both very well-centred and highly defeatist. In his view, the media fundamentally defines an unbalanced power dynamic and lays the ground for mental derangement. However, I find this to be incorrect.
Yes, systemic determinants do influence how we behave and respond to stimuli. But what the structure of neo-media, along with past media, does is to create an initial position, a position of serfdom to the algorithm, to the influencers, and to the game of subjective voices.
We accept and perpetuate this initial position by joining the amorphic corpus of the audience. By taking our seats in the theatre hall, we renounce our agency and moral responsibility towards the things we witness, choosing to categorize them as entertainment objects. We choose to construct our realities and opinions around social archetypes defined by viral posts on the Internet. The keyword in this paragraph is “choose.”
In reality, an initial position is not the end of a journey. Our relationship with neo-media can and should change. What Kierkegaard did not realize during his time is that being at the receiving end of the talking tube can mean many different things. It can mean being the submissive listener, merely a cell of the audience corpus, or being an informed actor who understands the fundamentals of media and consumes it with sobriety and mindfulness.
The audience assimilates information only if it, like a Trojan horse, bypasses the intellectual scrutiny of the brain. If media is seen as entertainment, there is no codified intellectual regard for the members of the audience. Thus, what we ought to do is not to be fooled by the illusion that it’s all harmless fun, but rather to consciously engage with the underlying ideas presented to us.
No rational human being would infer that all immigrants are criminals from one news story. But if the story appeals to the heart, bypasses judgement, and offers a plethora of tragedy and passion in its telling, it does have the character to spawn an extremist movement.
The media consciousness arises from bits and pieces collected without scrutiny. To avoid the fundamental fallacies of communication hidden within its fabric, we must not cease consumption immediately, or take any Luddite stance. Rather, we are responsible for understanding how we form opinions, how we internalize information, and how social systems create pressure to conform.
When offered a seat in the theatre hall, opt to stand up instead.
I think most of us are struggling to make sense of the bombardment of "news" we encounter daily. On top of that we have to fight the algorithms that try to spoon feed us the "information" the software believes we want to be exposed to. I used to watch TV news 3+ hours a day (mostly MSNBC and CNN), before I came to the conclusion, that basically all add driven news presentation has an agenda, and that includes newspapers, as my countryman, Kierkegaard, argued a long time ago. I've had a parallel discussion with another Stack writer, Michelle Teheux, about the role of education ( is job training education), and it gives me a headache to try to come up with a solution that may not exist. What does that leave us, other than forming associations with other seekers of the "truth" with the unintended consequence of ending in another bubble/ echochamber?