Timely Insights From Conversation with a Nautical Buoy Tender Nearly Forty Years Ago

             Once upon a time, when many of us regularly traveled by air, I took pleasure in striking up conversations with amenable, fellow passengers.  I have fond memories of insightful chats, one of which has particular resonance just now.

            Enroute to or from Florida, I learned about the life of a buoy tender based on a remote Bahamian island.  While I suspect, such facilities no longer require an on-site manager, my travel buddy hinted that the defense and intelligence community—and not just the Coast Guard—needed someone able to keep certain radio links up and running 24/7.

            The logistics of maritime telecommunications interested the techno geek in me, but what matter more triggered my academic training in communications theory, such as agenda setting, persuasion and manipulation.  Living for weeks alone in a remote part of the surprisingly large expanse of Bahamian islands, the buoy tender offered a one person study in the effects of frequent consumption of one—and seemingly only one—type of media.  Forty years ago, satellite radio did not exist and the buoy tender did not know about, or cared to pursue the plentiful options via shortwave radio.  Television and FM radio signals from Florida or Bahamian towns did not reach him and he had only a few video tapes in possession.

            Only one technology provided reliable access: AM radio.  Curiously, only one program format satisfied him: conservative, talk radio.  With lots of time on his hands, the buoy tender listened to one right wing pundit after another.  The hours of consumption had a profound effect.  This guy lived and breathed conservative doctrine, with a plentiful blend of conspiracy theories, including how the so-called Trilateral Commission was nearing success in achieving global domination.

            I’m thinking about this conversation now, because I see how people with far more diverse content options nevertheless can and do gravitate to a narrow sliver.  My communications scholar friends talk and write about “selective perception and retention.”  Now, media consumers have to perform less work to search for, and receive their preferred content. Social networks do the work for them.  While my travel buddy, over time, gravitated to a particular sliver of content, algorithms and machine learning serve it up without any search costs, or effort.

            The buoy tender could have pursued sports talk radio, oldies music and a variety of alternatives to political talk radio.  Forty years ago, he had to make daily actions to tune a particular AM channel at a specific time, so-called appointment radio.  Now, Facebook and other social networks make the appointments for us, anytime, anywhere, via many devices and with no limitations on availability.

            I am growing increasingly concerned that we have “improved worse.”