Hearne: Lefsetz Unmasks Twitter, Laments Passing of Shared Knowledge

Like many of you, I’ve got friends who swear by Facebook and Twitter…

I’ve also got friends who haven’t a clue. Stomper?. And like me, many of you probably passed through those portals a few years ago – I’ve got something approaching 9,000 Facebook “friends” (I never bothered to convert to “likes”) – but seldom bother to check it.

Which given the odd missed message, is kind of like never checking your mail or email, but somehow we manage, right?

But as entertainment lawyer/scribe Bob Lefsetz point out, are we missing anything?

Because while when I read the Kansas City Star or the Lawrence Journal World I learn a lot, it’s clear that those once mighty news outlets don’t hold anything approaching the sway they did as recently as even five or seven years ago. Let alone 10. Or 20.

Unfortunately they are still run by overseers who act as if they do.

So instead of clawing for the sort of news that really matters, has teeth and breaks them out of the Internet pack, they coast along the same as they did before the bottom dropped out in 2007. Providing minimal news coverage, humdrum opinion columns and tepid entertainment and pop culture information.

In other words, they’re still mailing it in.

Newspapers (and their websites) provide less and charge more. All while offering little evidence that they get it and are following a road map into the future that will resuscitate their tarnished brands.

When what they’re really doing is merely hanging on, making excuses and trying to get by with less and hoping against hope to ride out the free fall of the past seven years.

Now check out Lefsetz’ take:

There’s a fiction that if I know about it – if I’m aware of it – everybody is.

Furthermore, if for some reason you’re not, you’re an out of it nerd who’s got no knowledge of popular culture. But it doesn’t really happen that way at all.

I keep receiving e-mail that Ferguson was featured in the mailer’s Twitter feed or on their Facebook page. The assumption being therefore that everybody knows about it, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Because we all see different stuff on our feeds, if we’re paying attention at all.

Yes, despite all the Wall Street hype, most people don’t pay attention to Twitter.

Oh, they might have an account – they might have signed up when it was the rage a few years back – but they never check it out. So not only are they unaware of what’s going on there, everybody on Twitter follows different people, so they’re subjected to different information.

I was right on it with the Tony Stewart accident. I saw (Twitter CEO) Nathan Hubbard‘s tweet about it. But the only tweets about Ferguson in my feed came from Michael Moore.

Yup, we all get different information from different people.

We live in a Tower of Babel society that has been that way since the 21st century, when the Internet took hold. But no one wants to admit it, because that would mean their reach is tiny and that they don’t have their finger on the pulse.

But there is no pulse, that’s the point.

When there were three networks everybody knew about “Laugh-In,” (and) if you didn’t watch, you were a social pariah.

Ditto with MTV. If you were unaware of Culture Club you had no eyes. That’s what built the channel, everybody imploring their cable provider to add it so they wouldn’t be left out.

And today we don’t want to be left out on a grand scale. We want a broadband connection and a smartphone, but what appears on these devices…is usually completely different from what appears on someone else’s.

This is a huge problem in music.

Where people who follow the hits believe everybody does. Most of America is unaware of Jay Z‘s hits, never mind Iggy Azalea‘s. The world they live in is an echo chamber, which one can easily avoid.

As are the niches known as Americana and Active Rock. You think your favorite acts are impacting the general culture, that they  matter, that most people give a damn, but they don’t.

And tastemaker publications are operating on an old paradigm, that they’re gatekeepers, and they anoint the hits. But if your album is reviewed in the New York Times be sure to show your mother, because almost no one else gives a damn.

Same deal with a late night television appearance. Hell, check the ratings, and the statistics. That’s DVR hour, most people with the set on are watching recordings. We save Fallon and Kimmel, et al, for highlights the next day online, if we bother to follow them at all.

Gangnam Style

Sure, there are phenomena, like “Gangnam Style,” but now more than any time in our lifetimes, we live in a society where we consume different culture. Hell, we oftentimes even eat different food! That’s been a recent story, the upper classes consume stuff the lower have never heard of.

So come down off your throne and realize what is important to you is probably not to someone else. If you think you’re better than someone else because you know something they don’t, are aware of a record they aren’t, then you’re living in a 20th century world, it’s you who are out of it

So what’s the end game? A complete Balkanization of America? To the point where we all speak different languages?

That’s possible. Hell, it’s hard to go to dinner and find points of communication…

But the truth is we’re all yearning for central repositories of information where we can find out what is not only important, but what is the consensus.

This is Twitter’s number one problem…WHO DO I FOLLOW?

And they’re not doing a good job of telling us, because Twitter is populated by techies, not liberal arts majors. They understand numbers, but not concepts.

And if Facebook showed everybody the same thing, they’d squeeze out the small advertisers. Meanwhile, isn’t that the bitch, that you can’t reach as many people on Facebook as you used to, without spending zillions of dollars?

And dollars are more important than information in today’s society, that’s what we all cotton to. Jay Z got five million dollars from Samsung, it doesn’t matter whether anybody listened to the music he was promoting, never mind, remember it.

It’s like business is our national sport.

Forget baseball, so antiquated and so slow that only oldsters truly care.

But now the diamond fanatics will be e-mailing I’m wrong, that their 10 year old is a diehard fan!

And there you’ve got the problem in a nutshell. Your anecdotal evidence cannot be spread to the masses, it just doesn’t fly.

Check baseball ratings, they’re anemic.

As are most music sales.

Because most people are just not paying attention and this is bad for society at large.

Yes, it’s great we’re disconnected from the old intermediaries, the old filters that decided what was a hit. And it’s great that the only news that happens is not in the newspaper and on TV.

But having destroyed the old model, what is the new, chaos?

If the music industry had a clue – which it doesn’t – it’d post a weekly list of what America needs to check out, crossing all genres. Just like the old “Give The Gift Of Music” campaign. The key would be to build hits which benefited all of us. But no one in the industry can see this, that there’s mayhem in the marketplace.

And the old news outlets are operating on old models, if they’re operating at all.

And the Internet news outlets believe in clicks, because after all it’s about money.

And I’m stuck here in the middle with you. With tons of information and little time, wondering where to start.