What News Should We Choose?

I've talked before about "information overload" on the Internet - too much news, facts, and data for any one person to comprehend - and the effect it has on our ability to understand the world around us. Well, Curtis Brainard in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review has suggested an alternative phrase for this problem, and I must admit his is better.

The problem is not information overload, but rather access-to-information
overload. Since well before the creation of the printing press, there has been
more news available on a given day than any one person could follow, and more
information than any one reporter could process. It’s just that today both
reporter and reader have much greater access to the news and information, and as
such, there is a greater need to employ filters and other tools to help us
organize and manage the deluge.

Great point, and I commend him for it, but, like so much of cjr.org, this article fails to go on and prescribe a solution to the problem.

Brainard suggests using Internet filters, bookmarks and RSS feed to sort through the information found on the web. Sure, it's good advice but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize you'll need to organize this tidal wave of information somehow. What he fails to suggest is what criteria readers should use in organizing the information they find.

Should they target a specific politician, political party or issue that they feel passionately about and subscribe to every RSS feed that mentions it? Should they sort news by geographic area, assume what's closest to them is most always the most important in their daily lives? Should they visit all the websites their friends and coworkers visit, so they will be able to keep up in water cooler conversations? Or should they bookmark only the news sites that give them the news they want to hear - all about honors students and adopting puppies with no indication of war or economic decline?

We all know that there is an "access-to-information overload," we see it everyday when we sign on to our web browsers. What Brainard needs to tell us is, What news should we choose?

Lee Abrams Speaks

I've had my eye on Lee Abrams for a while now, but just recently I had the opportunity to meet him face-to-face. He was in Los Angeles to speak at an LA Press Club event about the future of news. Great topic, great speaker: of course I was there. You can check out what Abrams, the Chief Innovation Officer for the Tribune Company, had to say about the Los Angeles Times, the employee cutbacks and the changing nature of storytelling in a five-part series of you tube videos.

Wow

This week's New York Times Magazine has just blown my mind. Read it.

Keeping in Touch

Just before Barack Obama took to the stage for his acceptance speech in Grant Park, he emailed his supporters with a personal note of thanks and a promise: “I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.” That promise came after months of a campaign whose ultimate strategy seemed to be keeping in touch: with emails, text message and a comprehensive website.

But now that he’s been elected, it’s more important than ever for Obama to keep in touch with a citizenry lost in the technical jargon of a recession and increasingly unaware of the world around them.

The political climate isn’t unlike that of the 1932 election, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt beat the incumbent Herbert Hoover for the presidential spot. Like Obama, Roosevelt inherited a depressed economy, a massive unemployment rate, and a public on the brink of loosing hope. I believe that, like Roosevelt, Obama has the potential to massively change our country for the better.

But in order to do that, he must keep in touch.

Roosevelt’s fireside chats, a series of thirty radio programs directly addressing American citizens and explaining the complex financial issues surrounding the Depression, were massively popular and greatly affected his influence as president. Roosevelt faced a Republican-dominated legislator, and the massive amount of letters that poured in to senators’ and representatives’ offices after a fireside chat were enough to pressure those legislators into passing some of the president’s more radical measures.

Obama will enter the White House with a Democrat-dominated legislator, and so he will not need help in passing legislation. Obama, instead, will need help in keeping face. That is to say, he may need to keep the public on his side in a war against the media.

The media has been anti-Bush, and anti-conservative, for so long now that we are apt to forget that the media isn’t naturally inclined to be anti-conservative, but rather anti-authority. The Watergate legacy of news media has left it with ample reason to doubt those in power, regardless of who they are.

And the media may have only been energized by the audacity of the Bush administration. The amount of news dedicated to politics and the amount of excitement concerning that news has only increased in the Karl Rove, WMD, wire-tapping era. And the outrageous Sarah Palin impersonations and other election news only elevated that level of elation.

That excitement regarding anti-authority political reporting isn’t likely to die down once Obama sits in the Oval Office.
In fact, because the 24-hour news networks admittedly pander to public interests, the amount of political coverage may increase given Obama’s popularity. And as long as Obama remains popular with the public, we may see and increase in favorable coverage of the White House.

But should Obama lose the trust and faith of the public, should he fail to deliver on his message of change, or should he abandon his message of hope, he could lose the favor of the public and the media will, no doubt, follow.

Thus, it is integrally important that Obama follows through on his promise to “be in touch.” He must do as Franklin Roosevelt did to win the affection of his supporters and his opponents (for fear of Fox News) and he must keep the trust of the American people.

Step Away from Anti-intellectualism

Today Nicholas Kristof wrote a great piece today in his column at The New York Times exalting Obama as a true intellectual, the first we've had in the white house since Kennedy. He calls last week's victory in the presidential race "a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life." Of course, I agree, but it's Kristof's definition of what exactly makes an intellectual that interests me most:

"An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity."

The key is the distinction he makes between an intellectual's (presumably, Obama's) appreciation of uncertainties and contraditions, and the rigidity and "moral clarity" of so many of our anti-intellectual leaders (here, President Bush, but also John McCain and most of our recent presidents.) It's important to note that this distinction is not a Democrat-Republican distinction, or a conservative-liberal distinction, or even a conservative-progressive distinction. This is a distinction between those who see a clear, morally correct way of ruling and those who accept that they don't know it all, but are willing to try all options in pursuit of the most appropriate way of ruling for the time being. It's idealism vs. pragmatism.

In this moment, with the state of the economy and the military conflicts in the middle east, and the changing balance of power due to globalization, we need a pragmatist more than ever. No one knows what will happen in the next four years; we need someone who will be willing to look at the state of our nation objectively and explore solutions that may be unprecedented or unconventional, solutions that just may work.

The Death of Objectivity

"Opinions. Ours, yours and theirs." This was the text of a Los Angeles Times advertisement touting the paper's political coverage. It ran on the back page of the California section, under the weather, which is perhaps the only truly objective pursuit of journalism today.
It used to be that journalists prided themselves on not having opinions - not having agendas or biases. It was regarded as a journalistic virtue to coolly report facts and give a detailed picture of the story while remaining objective. Today, that is not the case. Journalism has abandoned objectivity in favor of opinion reporting. You can see it on MSNBC, you can see it on Fox News, you can see it on the celebrity status reached by journalists like Anderson Cooper, and you can see it, certainly, in the "new guard" of journalism - the bloggers who take pride in flaunting their opinions across the internet.
The important question then is, does this abandoning of the journalistic virtue leave us, as a society looking to the news media for information, lacking? Or is it merely a journalistic adaptation to our world of increasing media proliferation?
I would argue the latter. The journalist's role as a keeper and disseminator of information has been made insignificant by the advent of the internet. The fact that official documents, expert opinions, and first-hand accounts are available at the click of a button means that the journalist is no longer needed to provide those things.
But it doesn't mean the journalist is no longer needed.
In fact, the role that the journalist plays today in aiding the public to understand the great tidal wave of information available on all topics is even more important than ever before. Just because statistics and quotations and video clips - all those components of a good journalism story - are available to the public doesn't mean that the public can fill in the gaps for itself. The sum of all the components of a story is not equal to that story.
There's a certain finesse to interpreting a story and making it understandable to the public, and this is the role for the journalist.
This role, believe it or not, can include articulating an opinion.
And so, as our news media turn away from the long-standing pillar of objectivity and new system which values the personal opinion of the journalist, we can understand it as more than just a selfish grappling for fame and fortune, but as a necessary adaptation to a society which has come to consume information and receive facts in a much different way than it did a decade ago. It's not necessary to talk of the abandonment of traditional journalistic values as the devolution of journalism. Rather, we can realize the changing environment in which we live and understand the factors that make it necessary to adapt. And, if we are all very understanding, we, as news consumers, can adapt too.

Wiki World: The Changing role of Knowledge and Truth in Our Postmodern World

In January of 2001, Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales launched the encyclopedia for the internet age – Wikipedia. The online-encyclopedia (which, in an ironic move has just released a CD version) contains more than 10 million articles written by contributors world-wide. It’s an encyclopedia of the people, for the people and by the people.
A quarter century earlier, Denis Diderot established the precedent for Wales’ subversive move. In 1751, he and his Enlightenment counterparts set out to write the Encyclopédie, a work that they hoped would eventually encompass all of human knowledge. The 35-volume work comprised 71,818 articles. It was not the first encyclopedia, but it was the first of its kind. This encyclopedia was subversive and novel. It encouraged a new way of looking at the world, a way that undermined conventional pathways of information. The writers of the Encyclopédie used observation and reason to challenge long-held perceptions of the world around them and they believed that through this sort of experimentation they could find the truth. Diderot professed, "All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.”
If the Encyclopédie encouraged examination, debate and investigation “without regard for anyone’s feelings,” then Wikipedia took that notion and turned it on its head: the online encyclopedia encourages these methods of examination with regard for everyone’s feelings. It’s an ever-changing document that reflects the unique and varied knowledge of (theoretically) every person in the world, in an attempt to approach the (theoretical) truth.
Wikipedia reflects our new internet-age, postmodern economy of information, in which knowledge is a constantly changing, ever-expanding and amorphous commodity and truth is an increasingly irrelevant and unattainable entity, approached most closely with observations from multiple viewpoints.
The wiki software of Wikipedia allows for mass collaboration by contributors from all over the world. These contributors come from all walks of life. Some are experts in their fields and professors at top universities, some are students. Some are repeat contributors, editing hundreds or thousands of articles on Wikipedia; some make only small changes to a few articles. This allowance for a great number of contributors allows for a great number of subjects to be covered by a great number of people from a great number of places. The core argument here is that the sum of everyone’s knowledge will tend toward the truth over time. (Schiff)
This “sum of all knowledge” theory was outlined long before the internet and wiki software made it an achievable possibility. In 1945, Friedrich Hayek recognized the importance of the individual in recognizing knowledge within the particular circumstance of time and space. “It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made.” (Hayek) This means that a bellhop at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood may be more well-versed in its number of rooms or notable residents than a scholar of 1920’s architecture at some top East Coast university. But together, the bellhop’s specific information about the hotel and the architecture scholar’s information about the structure will get us closer to the whole truth. Hayek’s dream of collaboration in pursue of the sum of all knowledge has been made possible by Wikipedia.
But the encyclopedia’s dependence on mass collaborations has caused many critics to complain that Wikipedia gives no privilege to those who really know what they’re talking about. Among these critics is Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia who has since broken his ties with the project. He argues that “too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions.” (Schiff) But in our postmodern economy of information, the question is, does it really matter where the information comes from?
For Wales, the answer is no. “To me, the key thing is getting it right. I don’t care if they’re a high-school kid or a Harvard professor.” (Schiff) And Wikipedia’s process emphasizes collaboration; that is, correction, deletion, and compromise.
Some argue that this “information by many” model produces more errors in greater numbers than conventional channels of information. But we must remember that it’s not uncommon to see corrections in a newspaper or magazine, or to witness changes in the reprinting of a second edition of a book. “When confronted with the evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia are wrong!” (Schiff) In fact, the scientific journal NATURE studied scientific encyclopedia entries in 2005 and found errors in both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica (4 in Wikipedia for every 3 in Britannica). In response, Britannica ran a half-page advertisement in the Times stating, “Britannica has never claimed to be error-free.” If Britannica doesn’t claim to be error-free and Wikipedia certainly doesn’t claim to be error-free, then are these errors significant?
Or, more importantly, is the truth significant? In our economy of information, where information is a commodity, the quantity of information is often regarded more highly than its quality. Neil Postman, in a speech titled Informing Ourselves to Death, commented on this changing utility of information: “Information is now a commodity that can be bought or sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one’s status.” (Postman) So as the Americans of the 1950s increased their status with shiny new cars or vacuum cleaners, the Americans of the 21st century are doing the same in an economy of information: equipping ourselves with the newest theories, conspiracies and political gossip as a means of increasing our prestige. We’ve moved beyond an economy of goods (even beyond an economy of services) to an economy of information.
As can be expected in Americans’ greed, this new economy has lead to an overwhelming amount of information available on radio, TV, billboards, cell phones, and most importantly the internet. We are swimming in knowledge. But is that good for us? Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian 1930s novel Brave New World, feared a time when too much information was available to the public. “Huxley feared those who would give us so much [information] that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.” (Winslow) Have we reached this numbing pointed of over-informedness that Huxley so fears?
According to Postman in the 1990s, the answer is simple: yes. “The tie between information and action has been severed.” (Postman) No longer do we inform ourselves for the sake of better preparing ourselves to live in the world. Today, we are informing ourselves as a means of adornment, a means of vanity. A veteran editor of the traditional Encyclopedia Britannica complains that “we can get the wrong answer to a question quicker than our fathers and mothers could find a pencil,” but in actuality it doesn’t matter; so long as we find an answer that suits us.
As Diderot cut out the role of the church in delivering absolute information directly from the omniscient God, Wales has cut out the traditional mediating forces of the news media, who have for the past 500 years mediated the flow of news to the public, making a profession of packaging it and editing it in a way that the public can make sense of the world around them. These media lords were once the gatekeepers of information, but today those gates have run over, and the flood of information has not created a better, more knowledgeable public. Instead, it has drowned us all in a seeming unapproachable, but constantly oppressive truth.