Does the marketplace of ideas and media leaves us overwhelmed and disaffacted?

The contermporary marketplace deals with a vast variety of ideas and media. In the last decades the term media had become a concept of different constituents that is not merely consisting of newspapers anymore. Furthermore, television and the internet have become a main source of information and entertainment. Social media exemplifies the rapid development and a change of media sources online. Websites such as Facebook or Twitter are technical companies that only deal with journalistical content as one feature in their offering.

 Therefore, the definition of a well-informed citizen evolved. Nowdays it is more difficult to organize the selection of media sources. A well-organized citizen has to pick one or a few publishing or technical company in order to achieve at least a little selection of information. The more tenuous part is to know, if the source is trustworthy. In the contemporary circumstances, that decision provides a realistic illustration how confused a consumer might be nowadays.

Notably, in addition to that struggle is that most of the citizens just choose the source that the majority has choosen. This is sort of a paradoxon. The marketplace offers so many alternatives for so many different types of citizens that one could assume everyone is able to find a proper niche. This assumption seems to be wrong, because circulation numbers show a trend of considering one source as the best one, for example a number one hit in the music charts or a book in the best-seller list.

Summing up, I see a trend of citizens who are overwhelmed and disaffacted by the marketplace and especially by too many alternatives. People tend to have difficulties with decisions that will not get better by offering as much alternatives as possible.

sources:
 ''Cultural critism and the way we live now'' by Louis Menand, 10/17/2016
''Deciderization 2007---a Special Report''by David Foster Wallace, 2007