Before we start, I just want to say, what I am writing here is 100% my personal thoughts and my view of the mass media. So, if I offend anyone with my writing, please forgive me beforehand. With that in mind, let’s get at it.
A little about myself, my dad was an Indonesian diplomat from the seventies all the way to the mid-2000s. So me and my big sister moved around a lot growing up, I was born in Bonn, Germany, spent my kindergarten days in Chicago, USA, then came back to Indonesia for most of my elementary days, moved to Tehran, Iran in my odd yet adventurous middle school years, moved back to Indonesia during high school, spent a leap year in Vienna, Austria afterwards, then went to Kalamazoo, USA for college, before coming back home and finally settling in Jakarta, Indonesia till today. Always moving around, I had to make new friends every 4 years or so and having to start all over.
To tell you the truth, I was always the odd kid out wherever I lived, confident but odd none the less. When abroad, obviously I was the foreigner, when in Indonesia, I was never Indonesian enough. But, now that I am in my forties, I feel blessed to have had the experience of being a minority in race and religion in faraway lands and when I’m back, I live as part of the majority, as a so-called Pribumi Muslim man in Indonesia. When I was a kid, I used to envy people who never moved and who had lifelong childhood pals, something I never had growing up, but today I am grateful to have had my unorthodox upbringing because all those experiences have benefited me in being able to look between the lines and get a different perspective on things now that I am a bit older (per-say 😊).
Along the line I used these experiences to benefit my professional life, one way or another I have always functioned or worked as an analyst. I look at data, cultivate it and at the end use it to create greater value for the sake of publicity, performance, or sales. Today I partly own and co-run three different businesses, a media monitoring agency (Explicar), a B2B online ticketing platform specifically made to cater places of interest like museums, zoos, amusement parks in Indonesia (Liburania) and a newly made hawker food stall (aka warung) selling affordable Ramen in Jakarta (Papa Ramen).
So, from what I have learned from living these 40ish years, working for the last 22 years and creating and building my own businesses the last 7 years is that social consciousness shapes cultures, infiltrate politics and change how we see and live in this world. From my simple understanding social consciousness is a set of beliefs shared upon a group of people, while a belief if broken down to its core is just a set of standardized information believed to be absolute.
Social consciousness can manifest itself in different shapes and forms from religion, political allegiances, school of economic/scientific/social beliefs to even die-hard fandom. Social consciousnesses can lasts centuries, other decades, others only last weeks. Some evolve, some stay stagnant, some die out, some get disproved, etc.
One thing for sure there are many shapes and forms of social consciousnesses, but how they grow and evolve are all the same, through communication, which must flow through some type of media, may it be through soundwaves through the air, the written word, the printed word, pictures or/and sound through airwaves, or data through the world wide web. The standardized information of a belief must be conveyed through a certain type of media before someone can accept it, participate and be part of it. So even though, as people say, content is king, the way on which the information is dissipated is also as important.
With every major evolution in mass media, a social revolution usually follows. Various kingdoms collapsed after the adoption of the press print became common, power for the people rose and democracy was born. Propaganda and so-called truths spread like wildfire after the emergence of the radio, followed by the spread of new philosophies like Nazism, Fascism, Communism, Capitalism and all the other clash of “isms” that led to World War II. Afterwards the two “isms” that came out on top tried to utilize airwaves and all the other mass communication media in their pursuit to conquer the world during the cold war era, sometimes by force but mostly by pushing their social consciousness in different areas around the globe. At the end, I say the more relaxed and fun “ism” came out on top. Did the winning “ism” conquer the world? Not entirely, in my opinion…
To sum things up, I think, most radical social change in history was shaped by a leading social consciousness that spread throughout society. So, I guess, it is true what they say, the pen is mightier than the sword, eventually that is. These days if an overlord (whomever it may be) comes to me and demanding me to obey with force and a gun, I might obey at gunpoint, but by God will I be protesting afterwards and showing the protest through social media with a hashtag of course, so other people who do not follow me can find my struggle. Just look at what is happening in Ukraine the past couple of months/years.
Anyways with that in mind, it comes to the latest life changing mass communication network to influence the modern era, the internet. If back then all mass communication avenues were one-way lines of communications, with only the affluent being able to push their agenda to the masses, with the internet everybody can participate and join in the mass conversation. I am not saying that it is easier to become the next Hitler with social media these days, but it is by far easier to put your subversive narrative out there. I mean give it time and effort and believe me you will find likeminded people on the internet, and you can grow your next “ism” or social revolution from there…
With the internet, blogs, and social media it is much easier to put a narrative out to the world, who would be listening to that narrative is a different conversation. But one thing I find common with every place I have ever lived or visited, is that the best way to rally people to your narrative is dissatisfaction, and what is the cause of the so-called dissatisfaction? It is always something, somebody, or some other group of course. The key word here is, RAGE RULES!
When I lived in Tehran, Iran in the early 90’s it was always the Americans, in Vienna, Austria in the late nineties early 2000’s it was the immigrants, especially Turkish immigrants, when I was in college in the US after 9/11 it was Muslim people in general, in Indonesia mid 90’s it was the Chinese immigrants who were the focus of the rage. Wherever I lived there was always this rage bubbling from dissatisfaction spewed from the ruling social consciousness of the majority.
Do any of these raging social consciousnesses have any merit? Well, there is always two sides of a story, but all these narratives had real life consequences to thousands even millions of people. One thing I find in common that even though these story narratives might have had historical truths behind it, that is not what I’m trying to point out, I am not in any way trying to point any moral compass, what I’m trying to point out is that these narratives were further highlighted by a group of elites may it be politicians, religious clerics, the elite ruling class or whomever they might have been to further their own agendas through various types of mass communication avenues of the time in their disposal. As Indonesians would say, there is a shrimp behind that rock…
Back in the mid-nineties and early 2000’s even though the internet was already widely available, speed, accessibility and portability were still far and wide from what we have today. Most of the time back then you had to be on your desktop computer, have a modem, have a working land phone line, after that had to have an internet provider subscription to get on the internet, and when you were on the internet you had to compete with your annoying sister for the telephone line, because she just had to gossip with her bestie about blah blah blah… So, at those times your main source of news and entertainment were limited to the more traditional channels of the time, namely print, radio and TV, all one-way media consumption. You read, listened, and watched what was in front of you with extremely limited choice on what was available.
Unlike today where you have the whole of human history and knowledge available on your sweaty little palms, not only that, but it is available in text, audio even video if you want to find it that is. The thing is, it was easier for the elite back then to hypnotize or influence the masses. Why is it different today? It all sums up to the competition, the internet democratized the mass media communication engine, everybody and anybody can blast their thoughts, feelings, point of view through the internet. All those eyes and ears on the ground through smartphones and social media, kept the elite and their mass media engine in check. If you want an example, just check out the Russian people protests on their government’s invasion of Ukraine.
So, has this abundance and vast information availability made your everyday homo sapiens become a more educated and rounded being? Personally, I do not think so… With the ever-growing influence of social media in our lives and the algorithms that govern what you see in your accounts, people today are more likely to go deeper and more infatuated with a certain type of social consciousness that adheres to their perceived life choices. People are more likely to skew one way or another, making fanaticism more common.
To tell you the truth, I truly do not envy the gen z generation growing up today, with all the information available I bet it is hard to find yourself and become a stable centrist person. I mean kids nowadays are bombarded by hundreds of different social consciousnesses daily that in some ways are trying to regularly recruit them or at least make them subscribe.
Back in the day, I knew who I was in my teenage years, I was a middle class, Muslim, Indonesian, who can be considered quite geeky with a tendency to bully people with his sharp tongue, who listened to Oasis but still loved Blur, and was a fanatic NBA enthusiast. Teenagers these days live life full of labels, in Indonesia today you can’t only be Muslim your either fanatic, modern or liberal, you can’t just be straight or gay there’s a whole array of letters that frankly keeps on getting a larger array of the alphabet with time. Other than that, you cannot just be Indonesian, you are either a kadrun or cebong (Indonesia’s slang version of conservative or liberal). Today kids are even identifying themselves from their diets, plant-based, vegan, vegetarian there are even people who I know who identify themselves as proud Atkins dieters, and do not get me started with other things that people identify with like flat earthers, QAnon or even being part of the BTS Army. It is hard being a kid these days, they get pulled way to the left or right with all that information on the internet, while still having to adhere with their parents set of values.
Furthermore, growing up I only needed to impress kids I went to school with, my family and people around a 10 km radius around where I lived, while kids today with the emergence of social media must impress the world. Furthermore, people are far less humane when communicating through the internet. Believe me, when I say the filter and empathy goes away when you do not have to see a person’s face, and you communicate/comment with words through a keyboard. Talk about hurt feelings, ouch… No wonder mental illness around the world has risen in record pacing levels.
As I said before, it is hard to grow up as a stable centered person these days. With social media becoming the more prominent source of information these days, it is hard for people to receive unbiased newsworthy journalism. It is a lot easier to get (compared to the nineties), if you seek it, but with all the bias, divisiveness, and untrustworthiness of today’s world it is harder for good journalism outlets to reach audiences, to be frank sensationalism sells. Plus, the truth is often complicated, and what people want are snippets with bombastic content.
Other than that, with social media people are more likely to get posts of filtered information that skews towards their preferred interest set by an algorithm that shows posts from likeminded accounts &/ groups. This becomes more alarming when according to a report created by a joint study by Reuters Institute and Oxford University which noted that around 85% of urban Indonesian respondents noted that they get their news from online sources which include social media sources, and the device of choice was through their smartphones. (Steele, n.d.) It is even more alarming, that another study showed that it is being more common for Indonesian gen z people get their news from news aggregators that compile daily news based on cookies and browsing history. I mean talk about getting even deeper into the hole. Hhmmm give me the red pill por favor….
So, when I say it is harder to become a modern Hitler in today’s world, I really believe it to be true. The bombardment of information makes it even harder to catch the mass’ attention, and once you catch that attention it is even harder to maintain it. People’s attention span is decreasing by the minute, well at least in Indonesia that is. Take example the rise and fall of 212 movement and then the Sunda Empire in Indonesia. I mean these movements had meteoric rises in popularity in Indonesian society, although many have tried to ride on their coattails and the people in it made continuous attempts to keep the machine going, these movements fall of influence in the masses fizzled as fast as their rise, and it was on to the next one.
Indonesian’s also have low trust in the news, in the same study by Reuters Institute it noted that there is only a 39% level of trust in Indonesian news outlets, even lower than Malaysia at 41%. You must keep in mind that Malaysia had just been through the collapse of a reformist government in February 2020, renewed political instability and a national state of emergency, ostensibly because of COVID-19, have reversed hopes for improvement in media freedom in Malaysia. (Steele, n.d.) What is more interesting about news trustworthiness in Indonesia, the study also noted that the news brand with greatest reach in Indonesia, TVOne, is also one of the brands with a large 12% minority that say that they don’t trust it, which some may attribute to its more sensational style of reporting. (Steele, n.d.)
Looking at the numbers, there is some truth to it I guess, I mean my own 75-year-old father who watches TVOne daily, seems to be always enraged and yelling disagreement on what is being reported on the channel.
Well to sum it all up, what I am trying to say is that since the emergence of the smartphone and social media into our daily lives, the PR game, in my point of view, has changed drastically. I think the old way of benchmarking the success of PR campaigns (especially in Indonesia) through the calculation of Advertisement Value Equivalent (AVE) of media report findings from a PR campaign is no longer a scalable way to gauge the success levels of a PR campaign.
At the end of the day, AVE calculation is a simple financial justification towards the investment needed to conduct a certain PR Campaign. Those numbers do not reflect on how successful the created message traveled throughout the masses, which should be the underlying benchmark for success. The benchmark should not be in terms of hard currency, but on how effective the message was received by the target market. To gauge that, not only the number of publications should be accounted for, but what was publicized in each article/post in each publication/media must also be accounted for too. Like the key messages, quoted spokesperson, what images surfaced, angle of reporting, the tonality of each report circulation numbers of the media, and most importantly the impact and objectives of the campaign. I mean if you want to be fair the media trustworthiness value should also have effect to the benchmark of how the message traveled through the masses.
Other than that, with the changing times, it cannot be denied that social media has a vast influence on how a PR campaign can travel through the masses. It is funny to me that most communication professionals still separate internal/corporate communications, digital internal/corporate communications, external/marketing communications, and digital external/marketing communications as separate efforts. In today’s world a consolidated 360-degree communications front is necessary. I mean just look at the communications efforts of the Russian Federation in the invasion of Ukraine. The Russian propaganda machine is still stuck in the past Soviet era ways of propaganda. Just check this article on thedailybeast.com on John Oliver’s view of the invasion on his Last Week Tonight show on HBO (specifically scroll to the video around 2:55).
It seems compartmentalizing of information these days is mission impossible. Somewhere, somehow or/and someone always leaks, reports, or finds wrongdoing and later post it on the internet, so partial communication efforts, at least I think, is outdated. I mean if the people in charge of the Russian government, a country that is consistently being listed in the top 10 of nations having the best hackers in the world, still believe in the 90’s Soviet cold war state media propaganda machine as a viable communication tactic to win over their countries and world sentiment, I guess it is still fair game for companies to still utilize AVEs as a benchmark of success for their PR campaigns. Well, to think about it, boomers are still the one’s with the ultimate control hehehe…
Lastly, this is just my way of thinking, but I am intent on finding a new benchmark for calculating the success of a PR campaign. So, if anyone out there has any interest on this like I do, please feel free to contact me and we can start a new social consciousness on PR benchmarking.
I hear AMEC has an interesting take on this, but it seems I gotta be a member and/or pay their course fees to get more info on their findings, which is fine, but thanks for taking your time to read through my bablings, it is greatly appreciated.