The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
old when the scandal erupted, recalls that, “My character, my looks, and my life were picked apart mercilessly. Truth and fiction mixed at random”—but not in a college campus dining hall, but for the whole world and “in the service of higher ratings” (2017, para. 5). “No rumor was too unsubstantiated, no innuendo too vile” for Fox as it torched Clinton with Lewinsky as tertiary target (2017, para. 6). Lewinsky was concerned about being indicted and could not readily leave her house for fear of being pursued by a news media scrum. Not surprisingly, the young woman entertained thoughts of suicide. Lewinsky also observes that an online platform, Drudge Report, broke the news of the affair that then cascaded onto more mainstream platforms—a pattern still evident in which flak campaigns often originate under the radar. While the now-middle aged Lewinsky has gone on to a productive life, an extraordinary testimony to her character, what she experienced when flak against Clinton graduated into scandal presents a bracing vision of how devastating a harassment campaign can be.
A Road Map
Having briefly considered the phenomenal experience of being caught in a flak-to-scandal campaign, I will attempt a more fine-grained account of what flak is. This chapter’s efforts at fleshed-out definition will implicate flak’s relation to scandal; its scale; the contrast between flak-in-discourse and flak-in-action; the taxonomy of targets toward which flak is directed; and what flak is not (fake news, conspiracy theory, activism). At the same time, while this investigation is not a media effects study, flak’s mediated dimensions necessarily implicate audiences. Thus, the discussion begs the question of how audiences decode texts—as well as the question of how audiences are constituted in the twenty-first century in ways that dovetail with flak. A brisk history of post-World War II concepts of the audience, an indispensable element of a flak campaign, initiates the discussion.
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Re-Inventing the Audience
The State project of unlocking the secrets of the audience was present at the establishment of communication as an academic discipline within the Cold War environment (Simpson, 1994). Human cognition and behavior is embedded within embodied experience and an infinite regress of social contexts within social contexts; and, for this reason, the project of predicting and controlling audience behavior has long been a conundrum. During the Cold War, Bernard Berelson and collaborators acknowledged they came up short in ascertaining what moved the needle for an audience: “Some kinds of communication […] on some kinds of issues, brought to some kinds of people under some kinds of conditions, have some kinds of effects” (Berelson et al., quoted in Franklin, 2004, p. 207).
In the same era, Paul Lazarsfeld and colleagues venture a more definite account of the audience through their concept of reinforcement effect (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1969). They report that, during an election campaign, audience members seek out messages that confirm pre-standing predilections that “close the deal” for their vote. At the same time, the researchers conclude that audience members construct figurative walls to thwart discordant messages. In this manner, Lazarsfeld and colleagues posit audiences as actively parsing messages as well as being conditioned by social influences (e.g., co-workers respected for knowledge) situated between an audience member and the text.
With the advent of Cultural Studies after the 1960s, audiences were endowed with further powers by academic observers of them. For cultural studies scholars, audience members were generally envisioned as active decoders in partly or globally rejecting mediated premises as, for example, primers for celebration of classism (Hall, 1993). Decoding models developed in the mid-twentieth were nonetheless grounded in a media environment with far fewer broadcast platforms. In the 1970s, audiences in the United States essentially had three television networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) from which to forage for their nightly programming. As a result, researchers could assume heterogeneous audiences to the era’s dominant television medium that were exposed to similar content. When everyone—from school children to grandmas, from all regions and social classes—saw similar programming, it was easy to begin with the premise that different audience members decode Laverne and Shirley very differently.
Beginning with the dissemination of cable television in the 1980s, mass broadcast audiences began to splinter, driven by the marriage of new ←26 | 27→technology to capitalist logics of audience segmentation into more striated market niches. Segmentation enables far more precise advertising appeals tailored to audience demographics and psychographics, beginning with the audience’s class characteristics (Hesmondhalgh, 2010, pp. 288–289).
Theorizations of media power that Des Freedman (2014) dubs “control models” assume strong media effects (audience moved this way and that, as if by joystick)—and they have long been marginal in media studies. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, investigators gleefully turned control models on their heads; audiences were not controlled by mass media, in this view, but had become increasingly important producers of discourse. Dan Gillmor’s We the media (2004) and Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) insist on utopian hopes come true on new media platforms. The global brain’s crowd wisdom was posited as plugged in and the so-called ex-audience had commandeered the printing presses. In Bloggers on the bus, Eric Boehlert (2009) envisions news media’s monopoly on insider-oriented news as broken, to the benefit of independent journalism and a better-informed public. Sophisticated blogs, such as Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed territory, could and did attract audiences of hundreds-of-thousands in startlingly short intervals (Boehlert, 2009, pp. 179–192), a democratization of the printing press not previously observed.
As is now more widely appreciated, new media has also unleashed a regime of fine print (Sterne, 2012), appropriation by illiberal regimes (Morozov, 2011) and Stasi-plus surveillance (Goodman, 2015). Moreover, after a couple of decades of shakeout, new media has replicated many of the features (concentration of wealth, power and audiences) of the dinosaur media that it ostensibly supplanted (Fuchs, 2014). Twentieth-century media was mass media and it attempted to synchronize a collective heartbeat for society through shared mediated experience that reached most all of society—a Sisyphean task, for reasons given. However, in a neoliberal era of pervasive audience surveillance and mass customization/market segmentation (Andrejevic, 2004), there is no logic to even support an effort to convene the whole nation together. Instead, “killer facts” and narratives effectively seek out their audience niches. On social media, unwanted or jarring messages can be shunted off by the silent work of the algorithmic filter bubble that is, in turn, fueled by data mining toward finely-grained audience segmentation. As Delia Dumitrica observes, the tailoring of messages on Facebook is relentless and creates an apparently seamless ecosystem glossed as one’s preferred, “natural” habitat: “My identity, my friends, my world: the Facebook mediated global imaginary rests upon (the ←27 | 28→illusion of) choice. Today, choice is the epitome of agency, as well as a core neoliberal value” (Dumitrica, 2016, p. 199).
In turn, audience surveillance for purposes of prediction and control has achieved very high levels of sophistication. Facebook “Likes” furnish a powerful psychographic portrait of a person to whom well-tailored messages can be directed. Marcel Kosinski and colleagues explain the state of the science by 2013: “Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender” (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013, p. 5802). Kosinski and colleagues’ conclusions are grounded in a massive sample “of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests” (2013, p. 5802). After extracting out which “likes” cluster together and correlate with what traits from the psychometric tests, Kosinski and colleagues constructed models that can make accurate inferences about Facebook users. In turn, these inferences lend themselves to well-tailored, psychographics-informed messaging.
In follow-up studies, the efficacy of Facebook data for tailored messaging has been empirically confirmed across very large populations using “ecologically-valid” (non-laboratory) methods. Kosinski and colleagues report that inferences from even a small number of Facebook likes powerfully heightens the impact of targeted messages on observable behaviors: “In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically