A conditional example: the king's mouthpiece does not need to be adjusted to the listeners. The recipient of information has had a purely passive role for centuries. But gradually this role began to change.
Life on social media
The higher the status of the speaker (gods by priests, kings of the kings), the less concerned he is with the listener - the "sacred" word and so it will reach inviolability, having the obligation to fulfill all.
This system began to crumble with the appearance of dependence on the recipient, for example, a commercial order. The reader/viewer was needed because he himself bought this or that information product, or it, sitting at the TV, sold to advertisers.
All this facilitates social management processes with every step. And at the same time, directly or indirectly, it programs a person's behavior. The 20th century used all possible methods for this purpose, including the use of all new media - radio, film, television. The state has entered every home and every head with its word. Totalitarian states have added the use of coercive apparatuses to this communication chain, forcing them to listen and do what they say under the threat of punishment. Democratic states have used not hard, but soft power of programming behavior for the same purposes. They did not force people to behave in the right way.
Large volumes of the population will always need this kind of behaviour programming. The police regulate extreme deviations. Small fluctuations of behavior are programmed by education and media. By the way, China's social credit system, when any, even small, deviations are monitored, is also associated with large masses of the population, which, probably, have no other way to manage.
If advertising has a short cycle of such programming, culminating in a purchase, then public relations works with long cycles when the right type of behavior is activated at the right time, not now.
The twentieth century has completed the situation of social management, creating a mass man, mass culture and mass communication. We all began to watch the same films, read and watch the same news, and get carried away with the same books. And since childhood everyone knows everything about Harry Potter and almost nothing about astronomy, if it is not in the program of secondary school.
Man has become more unified in his thinking and behavior. We have a lot of common topics to talk about, but we do not talk about these topics, because everyone else speaks for us: before - TV, today - social media.
This has positive consequences for both business and politics. A person has lost all his protection and resistance, because information and virtual flows far exceed his power. He can only "swim" to where they are directing him. But the most important thing is that a modern person is dependent on these flows, he can no longer live without them. And as a result, he sits at the screens of different kinds for eight hours or more a day.
In this context, the behavioral behavioral behavior of the Behavioralists, the so-called nudge, was adopted by the governments of Great Britain, the United States and France. Supporters of this direction call their profession the architecture of choice, and themselves - architects of choice. They see it as their task to put a person in front of a choice that will encourage him to make the right decision. The United Kingdom has already experimented with this approach in the medical field, as most of the funding is spent on diseases caused by patient misconduct.
Finally, the time has come for the Internet, which was also created for political purposes. It had to strengthen the weak in their opposition to the power, helping them to unite and organize. "The Arab Spring was a prime example of the use of this toolkit. Information resistance turned into physical resistance when people came out to protest in the square.
Social media started a new stage of using information by people, or, more precisely, of programming behavior based on a combination of information and people. This was done for political purposes, when personal information about a person from social networks became public, which gave the developers of psychological targeting new opportunities for invisible influence on our behavior. Every person, proceeding from their interests and likes, belongs to a certain information group, that is why it is possible to talk to him/her on the basis of general characteristics of this group.
Besides, a person in social networks became a "loudspeaker" himself, distributing both fake and other messages that are close to him, and he wants to share them with everyone. In reality, he becomes a "co-author", such as a fake, because he is the one who makes the most of it. Fake activates the person, and the person starts the fake further, as it used to be with rumors and anecdotes.
This is the first time that a person has come into this new role at the moment of creation of mass literature. Within it, in contrast to "high" literature, the role of the reader has changed dramatically. If "high" literature is written by a writer, then the mass literature, as they say, is both writer and reader, because without taking into account the role of the reader, no bestseller is possible.
Another new phenomenon brought Netflix and similar companies. They made it possible to watch the TV series at least 24 hours a day, not focusing, as before, on the TV program, thereby largely destroying the entertainment status of the television, which ceased to be a monopoly.
The TV series already had the function of almost infinite retention of attention to itself without it. The empty streets of Soviet cities at the time of broadcasting the first foreign TV series are a vivid proof of this.
Today, the same function of attention retention is laid in all technical platforms. Everyone puts their likes and watches over strangers, not going beyond the social media. Human life began to be measured by likes and selfies. Now life has to live in such a way as to leave behind as many likes as possible.
All these examples demonstrate the changed role of the recipient of information, who is taking more and more active positions. It will become even more important in the future, when the idea of choosing the variant of the plot development by the viewer is realized. He will choose his own interesting plot forks and will watch as if his own individual TV series.
If you look at this development of information and communication technologies in history, we will see the next leaps in human development:
Today's technical innovations have also become "talking". Even children's toys are sent information about the consumer. And the new type of thermometer signals to pharmacists, where to send advertising of medicines, because the patient's temperature immediately becomes available to them.
The world is always transforming, the results of which are not always visible, because only physical manifestations are available to us, and the operations of influence on us are hidden and almost invisible. We think that our actions are independent, but this is not the case.