Randemonium

The original CNN concept

Ted Turner wanted the network to run fifteen hours a day, certain nobody would watch after midnight. Reese Schonfeld, who co-founded CNN with Ted Turner, held out for a full twenty-four, on a single wager: "people are going to stay up all night to watch this thing."¹ Schonfeld's channel launched in June 1980 as the first twenty-four-hour news network, built on a concept he called randemonium: at any moment there is a "current thing," whatever is the most amazing, controversial, or transfixing event happening anywhere in the world, and a continuous news channel exists to lock onto that thing and cover it for as many minutes, hours, or days as it remains the current thing.

The word "random" in randemonium described the operational method: for the duration of the current thing, whatever footage or reports become available go on screen, fragmentary eyewitness accounts, shaky footage, unverified claims corrected later if necessary, all live.

Proof points

The clearest validation came in the 1991 Gulf War, when CNN's live, continuous coverage of bombing raids in Baghdad kept audiences glued to the network around the clock for a week, becoming, in the framing used at the time, the most incredible show in the world, and the moment that made CNN what it became.¹ Later events, the Monica Lewinsky story and the O.J. Simpson trial among them, functioned as subsequent randemonium moments, though harder to sustain at the same intensity, and CNN spent roughly twenty years trying to recreate the experience with diminishing returns. By the current era, CNN itself has largely evolved away from the original concept, no longer organized primarily around locking onto a single current thing.

The internet reinvented it

The internet did to randemonium what CNN's format intended but could no longer execute at scale. Marc Andreessen traces the mechanism through three steps: the internet connects everyone to everyone with village-scale intimacy, making every current thing feel like everyone's business; the internet's native content form is the viral meme and outrage cycle, the way television's native form was the morality play; and social media and streaming platforms function as continuous randemonium engines, with new current things arriving every few days.¹ The resulting practice, watching what the current thing is at any given moment, has itself become both a cultural meme and a recognized form of media consumption.

The panic cycle

Each randemonium event on the internet follows a roughly predictable pattern: a spike as the current thing emerges and reaches peak emotional intensity, a decay of roughly two and a half days as outrage dissipates, displacement as a new current thing arrives and absorbs the emotional energy the previous one held, and a kind of amnesia within about a week, where the prior thing is not resolved or disproven, simply forgotten and displaced. Between a typical primary season and a general election, this produces on the order of a hundred to a hundred twenty such two-and-a-half-day cycles,¹ none of which individually determines the outcome, since elections tend to turn on economic fundamentals plus whatever the current thing happens to be on election day itself.

Relationship to prior media forms

Each media technology, in this reading, produces its own version of randemonium. Epic poetry and the campfire carried the shared story of a tribe. Competing newspapers in the 1700s and 1800s produced city-level randemonium, with multiple papers per city fighting for readers using outrage and slander; Benjamin Franklin is said to have run roughly fifteen pseudonymous voices arguing with each other inside his own newspaper.¹ Radio carried both wartime propaganda and, in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats, at a national scale. Television during the three-network era functioned as a period of suppressed randemonium, with centralized gatekeepers slowing the velocity of the current thing, a condition CNN's format was built to break. And the internet and social media era has unleashed the mechanism fully, at global scale and accelerating.

On this account, the centralized-media period running from roughly 1970 to the mid-2010s was the historical anomaly. The fragmented, high-velocity, often vitriolic media environment of the current era is closer to the historical norm than the calmer decades that preceded it.