Largest Storytelling Machine, the Media, can Create Engaged Citizenry

If people connect and orient their lives through stories, then the world’s largest storytelling machine, the mass media, holds the potential to cultivate an informed and involved citizenry, says Duane Elgin.

Elgin, international author and speaker, refers to the mass media as the collective mind of our society. He says the mass media directly and visibly expresses our social brain or collective mental functioning as civilizations. If this is true, we are ignoring our most powerful tool to understand the monumental challenges before us and envision solutions for a positive future, according to Elgin.

“To build a workable future, citizens require a quantum increase in the depth and quality of information and understanding,” writes Elgin in one of his most recent papers, entitled Vision, Communication, and Action for a New Social Consciousness. 

“We need a hearty, robust diet of socially-relevant media regarding the critical trends and choices facing communities, nations, and humanity as a whole.”

The media advocate who has founded three non-profits related to media accountability and reform says the first step in changing the media is holding it accountable to serve the public interest, as opposed to commercial interest that is perpetuating a consumerist mentality.

“If we are taking a billion hours a day or more to reinforce a consumerist-telling mindset — that we are adolescents, that we need to be entertained and pleasured —that story dominates our society,” Elgin tells Axiom News. 

“Where the mass media goes, so does the future.”

Elgin says we need stories that are authentic, compelling, true to people’s life experiences, and catalytic. He’d like to see more documentaries and investigative reports that give an in-depth understanding of the challenges we face and programming vividly portraying what life will be like within a generation if nothing is done to alter current trends.

Citing visioning as a powerful tool to catalyze change, Elgin says programs are needed that suggest what life could be like if we begin designing ourselves into a sustainable future.

“We cannot consciously build a future that we have not first imagined. . . . When we can see it, we can do it,” writes Elgin.

The final, critical step to harnessing the power of the media is to engage more people through thoughtful questions and reflection. Elgin says he's demonstrated this is possible when he and community stakeholders demanded their right to an hour of prime time at a local San Francisco television broadcast station.

The station granted their request, and the group piloted wide-scale electronic town-hall meetings. The meetings engaged more than 500 Bay Area citizens who would place six votes during the hour.

“Twenty-five years ago we demonstrated the capacity of large-scale, metropolitan conversations of our future,” says Eglin. 

“With a new politics of consciousness we could come together as communities to transform the heart of the media — broadcast television.”

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