Imagine a world, one easily conceivable today, where governments, businesses, lobbyists, candidates, and social movements deliver information directly to citizens on home computers. Journalism is momentarily abolished. Citizens tap into whatever information source they want on computer networks. They also send their own information and their own commentary. They are as easily disseminators as recipients of the news. The Audubon Society, the Ku Klux Klan, criminals in prison, children at summer camp, elderly people, etc. Each of us our own journalist.So how is the post-parenthesis so different?
What would happen? At first, I expect citizens would tend to rely on the most legitimate public officials for news, trusting especially what the White House sent their way. The President, as the single most symbolically potent, and legitimate source of authority, would gain even greater power… Other sources would be too difficult to evaluate. Congress for instance, would be more cacophonous than ever. Lines of authority that today give Congressional leaders more of a place in the public eye.
At that point, even social critics who now long for more public dialogue, more democratic discourse, more voices in the public sphere, would have had enough. People would want to sort through the endless information available. What is most important?…Demand would arise not only for indexers and abstracters, but for interpreters, reporters, and editors. Some people would seek partisan abstracts and analysis, but others, less confident in that existing parties, cults or sects represent their own views, would want independent observers—people wise to the ways of politics, but without strong commitments to either party, people able to read politicians well, to know them intimately, to see them and see through them.
Journalism, of some sort, would be reinvented. A professional press corps would reappear.
Pettitt: It still won’t be deciding. He’ll be a navigator rather than a gatekeeper. This new journalist, this post-parenthetical journalist, who would emerge after the period of chaos, he’ll be a different kind, with a different function. It’ll be a navigation function. He’ll help people to find their way through the network, rather than saying, “this is news and this isn’t, I’m going to let you read this, I’m not going to let you read this.”
Sauerberg: A blog is a good example. It’s endless and beginning-less. It’s endless flow. It’s a process. To put it another way, before, in the old days, you had very few able to read and write. They were seen as wise, most of them. Everybody else had to rely on their words, their interpretation of what was written.
DS: And what of the navigators in the new era?
Pettitt: Their authority will be on the basis of their track record, I think. In the world of rumor, you believe the people who were right last time.
"I expect citizens would tend to rely on the most legitimate public officials for news, trusting especially what the White House sent their way."
So the folks at CJR would rely on President Bush's word? And Rush Limbaugh's listeners' Obama's?
People will listen to what they want to hear - those who already agree with them. The Balkinization of opinion will continue, and likely worsen. Legitimacy is irrelevant, and those caught making false statements - like Dan Rather - are held up as heroes.
There is literally not a single news source, right or left, that is trustworthy today. It's all about enforcing The Narrative. Perhaps we are all Homer after all?
#1 Posted by Jayat, CJR on Sat 8 Jun 2013 at 09:56 AM
This is nonsense on stilts. It's as if nothing happened before about 900 CE. The only reference to an earlier period is to Homer. In the ancient west alone, how about: public inscriptions of laws and edicts on stone, with punishments prescribed for anyone who moved or defaced them; private inscriptions, such as curses, on metal (ever heard the phrase 'aere perennius'?); the disputes about the authentic and correct texts of the dramatists, Homer, etc. amongst grammarians from the 3rd c. BCE, of those of the founders of the school amongst Epicureans from the 2nd c. BCE, and of those of Plato and Aristotle amongst Academics & Peripatetics from the 2nd c. CE; Galen's complaints in the 2nd c. CE that people were circulating early works of his without his permission, and works not his under his name; and the vast numbers of papyri that have survived, preserving everything from private letters to New Comedy (and Epicurus). We even have writing tablets from Vindolanda. The "orality" of ancient Greek culture and the transition to literacy has been a topos for decades. (This is off the top of my head, by the way. Nothing fancy.) On the other hand, early printed editions of books often present very different texts. The number of "ephemeral" political pamphlets produced in Britain from the 17th c. on is staggering. In short, these authors seem to be peddlng a piece of fiction; so it's probably appropriate that its title would assign it to the Ludlum Corpus.
#2 Posted by Cat, CJR on Sat 8 Jun 2013 at 02:04 PM