Midterm Madness
A Dad's Eye View
As a father of four, my life is focused primarily on sports, feeding these monsters and keeping this together (and maybe a bit better in the end); but right now, the political has entered the realm of public focus way more than normal. This is because the midterm elections, not something I would normally particularly care about, seem to have taken over all aspects of the public view. There are more than the normal amount of commercials on sports and all of the normal commentators are getting their election time bump. It’s really interesting the algorithm bump I am seeing and I would like to see if other people are seeing similar things.
It is really interesting how many state level candidates are receiving national attention. I, for example, have been fed debates through the YouTube algorithms, which seem to also begun flowing to media companies stories. It is interesting to see how multiple different alternative media companies tend to have similar public focus stories. In this case it seems as though there are a few different interesting popular debates; Kari Lake challenged Katie Hobbs (dns), Oz and Fetterman (10/25/22), DeSantis and Crist, (10/24/22), Newsome and Dahl (10/23/22); all seemed to be watched with some national interest through the algorithm, and some discussed by the alternative media sites.
The polling has been fairly off the last few election cycles, but the algorithm seems to be catching an idea that seems to be of public view. Its going to be interesting to watch how the new media mediums are going to impact the elections just by the way that they are covering and discussing the topics. It is also going to be very interesting to see how this shift will affect the outcomes of the elections. Hopefully, we are able to see a little bit of change to the public focus from the national news media, companies such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and to different media systems like Timcast, DailyWire, Steven Crowder. I’m not sure exactly how the data is aggregated, but the streams of information up and down the mediums has wildly changed. If we look different ways information has moved up and down the line, we see it was mostly local until the printing press, then has continued to scale upward until we are now at almost a global level. This gives us some great advantages of information, but also creates a strange chasm between the local person and their local politics. This is probably because the incentive structures have moved from local to global because of the access to information across the internet.
What seems to be happening now is that the federal apparatuses that have previously been connected to national conversations have leaned heavily towards one “party”. What seems to have happened, at multiple levels of society, is that our national heuristics for things like medicine, politics, social structures, goal sets, have bifurcated and not enough of the population is feeling represented by either faction. Because the previous federal, and global., media sets have accumulated so much attention, their opinions are tending to have a large weight on the elections. This seems to be in line with the Straus-Howe Generational theory, but history doesn’t exactly repeat. I do not have any predictions, but the current midterms are going to be very interesting to see.
It is looking as though there is a lot of national focus on the midterm elections, a lot of that focus is coming from the new media. If the new media is to be believed as starting to take a rationally large amount of the public focus away from the old media sets, this election will be a good way to see how much of the national focus they actually engage with. Also, the extreme partisanship of the social media and media companies has been heavily exposed. What’s interesting is that when that happens, some people dig their head deeper into the sand. Unfortunately, if the media apparatus is focused on a goal, it does have the capacity to engage still a large portion of the nation which causes a lot of confusion.
I suppose the best thing to do now is wait, watch, and vote. I am looking up my local elections, obviously, and I am also looking up my national choices. It is interesting how a national focus on Gubernatorial races has made me focus on local and federal elections. I wish you all luck and hope you take your few minutes today and look up who you are going to vote for, and vote your conscience.