MG: It’s a great question. And, you’re right, people have always coalesced into interest groups, etc. If they hadn’t, we’d have, essentially, social anarchy. But the difference now comes down to information itself. The facts of the world. People who watch Fox aren’t just fed a different perspective on current events from people who watch MSNBC; they’re fed entirely different information. That’s its own kind of anarchy.
Also, though the Romantic Democratist in me loves the notion of a ‘we’re all in this together” attitude…I don’t mean to suggest that I think that’s been, to any real degree, the way of the world. There have always been divisions, as you say—just as there’s always been strife. (Colonial America, after all—that era that the Romantic Democratist in me holds in such high esteem—was a time of immense, and often quite vitriolic, partisanship. Newspaper editors, during the colonial period and in the early days of the Republic, often resolved political disagreements with brawls and even full-on duels.) What’s different now, though, again, is the information element: while maybe we never had a warm-and-fuzzy sense of “community,” what we did have was shared information that, implicitly, bound us together.
JP: So what does that mean for democracy? And what does this all have to do with the Web?
MG: Well, it means a lot. The problem isn’t just the present reality—although there are certainly many problems we can observe with the cognitive permissiveness of the niche right now—the bigger problem, really, is the trajectory we’re on.
One element of that trajectory: reality itself is taking on a moral sensibility—as if its discrete elements, the atomic units of reality formerly known as facts, were simply things that we have the luxury of choosing among. Hugely problematic, obviously, generally—but particularly so when it comes to democracy. Which is a system of government predicated on the notion of shared ideas and information. Citizens are presented with certain discrete elements of democracy: a slate of candidates, say—who, in turn, embody a whole tangle of positions and assumptions—or, in the case of referenda, a slate of facts themselves. They’re then expected to converse, and finally to vote, based on their appraisal of those elements. Opinions will vary, of course—that’s the whole point—but what shouldn’t vary, and indeed what can’t vary, is the core information itself. Without that, we lose our baseline of discussion. Not just our shared terms and definitions, but our sense of what the whole thing’s about in the first place.
JP: Let’s talk a little more about facts. It’s all a matter of perspective, and arguably what we think of as “facts” are really just dominant perspectives. The role of the newspaper, then (to bring this back to the point at hand) perhaps was to sort out all these competing perspectives and, for better or for worse, assert the dominant one; assert the “this is how it happened, and you can basically trust us on this, because we are professionals and we take our jobs seriously.”
But now, as that dissolves, maybe we’re reverting to a state where we’ve got all these competing perspectives, and no commonly accepted arbiter to sort them out. And so you can now pick and choose. And everybody believes what they want to believe; what is most convenient for them.
The question, then, is whether that’s bad or good for democracy. Obviously, you think that it’s bad. But I wonder if other people might disagree; if they might frame it another way. Internet enthusiasts, for example. “Look,” they might say. “The dominant perspective sucked. It excluded countless points of view. Now, everybody’s POV can be represented. Everybody is free to read the news that appeals to them; the news that they want to read. And the dominant sources can longer just pretend that these other perspectives don’t exist. Sure, it might get a bit cacophonous out there… but how, exactly, is that a bad thing for democracy?”
I live in San Francisco, one of the most mediated (and media-saturated) places in the United States, if not the world. Everything here has at least one controlling narrative (promulgated by at least three or four publications or blogs), and there are always ambitious journalists trying to extrapolate the Next Big Thing out of technological and social developments that feel, to people like me experiencing them first-hand, completely quotidian. Being the home of the EFF, Flickr, Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, and more large-scale New Media platforms creates a powerfully tangible sense of unreality at times, as New York Times and Economist stories regularly feature people who may be old friends from previous jobs or casual acquaintances from Burning Man. It makes all of us feel like self-important digerati from time to time, even if (like me) we've always been digital janitors, working behind the scenes.
Here's the kicker, though: San Francisco is an absolutely terrible place to try to stay on top of news having to do with San Francisco. I've only been here for 14 years, so I can't say with any authority that it's always been this way, but I'm an avid consumer of journalism, and i have to say that all of the local news sources are fatally compromised in one way or the other, and all the New Media in the world (more or less literally) hasn't substantially improved the situation. The SF Chronicle has a storied (pre-Hearst) past, but the present is a lot of generic AP wire stories, some uselessly establishmentarian / pure-politics local political coverage, and a tiny sliver of useful old-school civic-minded journalism from Matier & Ross and a couple other antediluvian (pre-Hearst) columnists. Bruce Brugmann talks a good fight about the need for a muckraking progressive press, but the SF Bay Guardian runs on good intentions, internships and Brugmann's fossilized ideas about progressivism. The SF Weekly is a dumping ground, with the occasional exception of Matt Smith's soi disant lone-man-with-a-typewriter schtick (and over time he too has ossified into a portrait of contrarianism for its own sake). And I've been looking and looking, and there's nothing equivalently useful going on in the blogosphere.
A point I think needs to be made is that if community and social connection are an important good fostered by a shared communal understanding of the news, the current intersection of technology and journalism provides a broken model. The "community" brought into existence by adding comments to the SF Chronicle / SF Weekly / SFist is not one that I recognize from my day-to-day life as a San Franciscan, and is not one iin which I have any interest in participating. I see this all over the place on newspaper sites and local news sites now -- comments sections seem to be pure id and seething resentment rather than any sort of discourse.
I guess my point is this: the internet and the web are disruptive technologies, but there's more to this point in time than just the internet wrecking traditional journalism. There's the corporate consolidation of news organizations under an ever-smaller number of owners, there's the explicit streamlining of news products in response to market research to make them more pure entertainment, there's the dissolution of the fragile, semi-mythical political and social consensuses of the postwar / Cold War era, there's the consequences of trying to figure out how to live in a more diverse (if not more tolerant) and less openly oligarchic or class-/race-/gender-privileged society. I think the main thing that technology has done has been to accelerate and expose processes that were already in play, and I think that must be incorporated into any brainstorming or planning journalists do in figuring out where things go next. I think we're in the middle of figuring out a new social compact, and even the smartest, most adaptable news organizations aren't going to be able to reliably ser
#1 Posted by Forrest L Norvell, CJR on Fri 11 Sep 2009 at 03:30 AM
The philosophical debate presented is interesting, but, like Forrest Norvell, the real frustration I have with my local paper (Vancouver Sun in Canada) is similar: where's the news?
Today the lead stories are various police news stories, the hockey team has begun training camp, a British pop star is in town, and a trailer for a movie being shot in the area has been furtively posted on YouTube.
I'm sorry, I know there are "slow news days," but I do expect the local rag to do better than this. I'm not saying the news should be more "serious," or serving the public good, or more respectful of the democratic process, or anything that noble. I just want it to be engaging, and while these stories are not uninteresting, they certainly don't grip me.
Take the hockey camp story. Yesterday, on facebook, a friend posted a picture showing one of the hockey team's stars, the high-paid goalie, posed with her husband and six-month old baby. It's a cute picture; the child has a funny expression on his face as he looks at the hockey star. (Probably gas.)
I suppose her posting is news of a sort, and it's fun, and if I see my friend I will comment about it, but it's not what I expect -- or somehow need -- on the front page of a newspaper.
Nor do I particularly want a story about the training camp on the front page--unless something highly dramatic or "significant" happened: maybe if the hockey star broke his leg and won't be able to play during the coming season, for instance. (God forbid; I am a fan.)
The newspaper, with its resources, should consistently give me engaging news that my friend, with her snapshot camera most likely cannot. We still need the news, that is, stories of interest and significance (psychologically if not materially) to the area community.
#2 Posted by Neale Adams, CJR on Sat 12 Sep 2009 at 10:40 AM
Both the original dialogue and the additional comments are remarkable. The following are offered as a non-critical contribution to the feedback loop:
@ MG - "A Wikipedia entry written by 20 million people will be more reality-reflective than an entry written by twenty people."
Without putting too fine a point on it, a typical Wikipedia entry is not written by 20 million people working on the same entry, it's written by different groups of 20 different people each working on 3 million separate articles. Not the same thing at all. A contributor might not know much about the process of rice farming in Asia, for example, but be an expert on Eastern European history. The friction you mention later is mostly in the subset of living people and current events which tend to reflect a political agenda.
"You really can’t have too many cooks in the kitchen on this one...What I am arguing against, ultimately, is the ghettoization of information."
I'm confused with this because it sounds like an inherent contradiction. It also seems to me that the fundamental model of how information is shared has always been ghettoized in the form of, for example, local news, specialized trade publications, academic journals, or a conversation with a neighbor across a fence. I could be wrong, but sense that one of the more critical elements of change seems to be at the touch points between groups, the interstitials.
@JP - "The news is fungible."
Sorry, but that's not true. If you read a story about the death of Michael Jackson which is pretty much the same as a dozen other stories, it can rightly be considered as a quasi-commodity. If you read a story about the city wanting to bulldoze your block to make way for a freeway, it's not fungible at all.
"Not just thinking about the best way to translate what we’re doing onto the Web, but thinking about their role in their communities."
Bingo. But the problem is that there are a few barriers to this. One is that the current business climate tends to block innovation unless it involves large economies of scale. Another, which is related, is that for a long time there has been a disruption in physical communities to the extent of a WalMartization and loss of sense of place. Still another is the fact that, with rare exceptions, the news community has been reactive and not pro-active about its own disruption brought on by the Internet. Due, one assumes, to a lack of ability to see trends which affect itself.
One example of this lack of awareness about the direction of things is current development in the area of the Semantic Web. Something which is making strides and likely to have a large impact in the fairly near future. Another is in the emergence of "intelligent assistants" such as the DARPA-derived SIRI project. This isn't Buck Rogers stuff; for its own survival, the news business needs to be awake and paying attention to fundamental shifts in the technology instead of the buzz of a Twitter or FaceBook.
Two of the common metaphors you hear about the Internet are that it is as profound as the invention of the printing press, and a paradigm shift of the telephone. Both true. But it strikes me that there is yet another metaphor in the sense of the proscenium arch and the early days of motion pictures. Once people started playing around with the camera's ability to move, it brought about an entirely new way of telling stories unbound by an existing frame of reference.
#3 Posted by Perry Gaskill, CJR on Mon 28 Sep 2009 at 11:25 PM