What is "the Mainstream"?
Over the past two years of our post-Election Coup / Covid saga, I’ve noticed I’m the only person who uses this term “the Mainstream”. Many use the word, but always in terms of “mainstream media” (or “MSM”) — which of course unduly delimits the phenomenon, and the problem.
As I’ve navigated around wielding this term, most just ignore my usage of it, while the remainder chide me for it and say it’s too broad and vague. So far, my usage of it is an ongoing process as I grapple with this breadth that threatens to dissipate in open-ended incoherence; and at times all I have is my intuition that it is not only a useful term, but urgently so in our devolving time.
For now, pending future postings, I will propose two observations-slash-descriptions:
The Mainstream is a cultural phenomenon that determines, for all members of the culture, what is Respectable and what is Real.
The Mainstream is comprised of all sectors & institutions of socio-political existence:
a) government (local, regional, national, international)
b) news media
c) schools
d) academe
e) science
f) technology
g) medicine/pharma
h) finance/business/corporations/big tech
i) arts & entertainment/sports.
More subdivisions could be adumbrated, of course: the law, police, and intelligence services would be subsumed under (a); unions under (h); and so forth.
Readjustments and/or clarifications could be made as well, insofar as the “big tech” portion under (h) is also increasingly central to the communications function of (b), if the two are not becoming indistinguishable by now; while (i) has been for perhaps decades increasingly merging with (b).
Future questions to probe & plumb:
Is literally everything subsumed under the a-i of “the Mainstream”?
Or are there radical “fringe” versions of some or all of these categories listed?
Who decides what is “respectably” Mainstream, and what is “fringe”?
Who decided what the Mainstream would comprise?
When did the Mainstream come into being? Was it always there, throughout the history of cultures?
And so forth.