Volume 21, 2020
Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay
Pages 109-118
Investment Media and Information Consumption
A Phenomenology of News Perceptions
Post-market economies are driven by ownership or shareholding interests. We may consider ourselves to be living in societies driven by investment blocks - there is no doubt in our minds, given our awareness of the information blocks that compose media content, that the interests of these investment quarters in a globalized geo-economy is what determines how news is presented and consumed. What are the characteristics of investment-driven media scenarios? Our concept of media scenario differs from information dispersal models in brand capitalism and media franchise (Chomsky 2002; Golding et al 2012)? The disintegration of values of social responsibility in journalism is also apparent in the rise of investment driven journalism, with its absolute dependence on the mirror neuronal mechanics of social behavior, where the individual likes falling in with performance, and post-truth dialogue. But there are also options and limits of consensus within such discursive practice, and selective attention as the consumer betrays preference for information. We hypothesize that the new information media is a product of investment acts, and is fluid by nature, never innocent, and is always conditioned by local interest factors, and is as Barnett argues in a paper, a simulacrum of shareholder values (Barnett 2009).