Those election post-mortems that blame Democrats for not going on podcasts or hiring influencers too late, or that give Trump’s team more credit for tapping streaming media are missing the bigger picture. I want to offer a deeper point, drawing on the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild. Much of the time, we think about media consumption simply in the context of the attention economy. That is, humans have a limited amount of time in each day, and so it matters a lot what we focus our attention on. The rise of digital media destabilized the old attention economy, where just a few programs and people dominated. Now competition for attention is fierce, with influencers and other new media creators building audiences as big or bigger than the ones consuming legacy media. So, if a new format like podcasting or streaming video becomes the “place” attracting attention from sought-after demographics like right-leaning young men, it makes sense to figure out how to compete for attention there.
What’s missing from this whole conversation, though, is why the Joe Rogans of our changing media world are attracting attention in the first place. The medium is only partly the message here—new formats alone and the Trump campaign’s willingness to flood them with content are not why he won this election.
This is where Hochschild offers some very useful ideas, I think.