"Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information"
About this Quote
Radicals love to talk about truth; Abbie Hoffman cared about delivery. “Structure is more important than content in the transmission of information” is less a media theory nugget than a field manual from the Yippie era, when politics was competing with television’s appetite for spectacle. Hoffman learned that messages don’t travel naked. They hitch a ride on formats: the press conference, the courtroom, the rally, the headline, the camera angle. Those forms decide what gets noticed, what gets repeated, what gets ridiculed, what gets filed away as “serious.”
The intent is tactical. If you want to move people, don’t just craft the “right” argument; hack the channel. Hoffman’s activism treated institutions like stages. Throw a pie, levitate the Pentagon, crash the narrative, and the media can’t help but relay the signal. The content may be radical, but the structure is what makes it legible and contagious.
The subtext is a cynical compliment to mass communication: audiences don’t reward nuance; they reward coherence, drama, and a frame they can process fast. Structure filters content into emotionally graspable shapes - hero/villain, conflict, outrage, punchline. That’s not morally neutral. It’s a warning that movements can be defanged or distorted by the very containers that amplify them, and that power often lies with whoever controls the template.
In Hoffman’s context - Vietnam, the counterculture, the rise of media politics - this is an early diagnosis of what now feels obvious in the age of algorithms: the feed’s architecture doesn’t just carry ideas. It edits them.
The intent is tactical. If you want to move people, don’t just craft the “right” argument; hack the channel. Hoffman’s activism treated institutions like stages. Throw a pie, levitate the Pentagon, crash the narrative, and the media can’t help but relay the signal. The content may be radical, but the structure is what makes it legible and contagious.
The subtext is a cynical compliment to mass communication: audiences don’t reward nuance; they reward coherence, drama, and a frame they can process fast. Structure filters content into emotionally graspable shapes - hero/villain, conflict, outrage, punchline. That’s not morally neutral. It’s a warning that movements can be defanged or distorted by the very containers that amplify them, and that power often lies with whoever controls the template.
In Hoffman’s context - Vietnam, the counterculture, the rise of media politics - this is an early diagnosis of what now feels obvious in the age of algorithms: the feed’s architecture doesn’t just carry ideas. It edits them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|
More Quotes by Abbie
Add to List
