Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Think it: News as a bludgeoning device

Published on 05/01/09
by Zac Echola

I’ve noticed, as I’m sure you have, whenever a topic of international interest comes up, bloggers, twitterers, people from all over throw their opinions into the matter, share information and follow the topic intently. And then after a matter of days or even hours…nothing. After the initial cause célèbre peters out, we move onto the next shiny object.

Consider the following recent soupes du jour (to borrow another French phrase):

  • The Iraq War
  • Darfur
  • Myanmar
  • Mumbai
  • South Ossetia

All of these had a tremendous spike in interest and then quickly died out. Why? Do the consequences of each event become less important through the passage of a short time? I’d posit they don’t. What happens, as we know through recent research (read this excellent CJR article for more), is that people reach information fatigue fairly quickly. As such, a river of news may not be the best approach to sustain attention.

In college, I studied American Studies, which is less the study of America, as you’d suspect, and more the study of cultural connectivity. “Connectivity Studies” doesn’t pass the academic naming litmus, I assume. Anyway, nature abhors a vacuum. For example, fog is created by cool air over warm water.  It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere to prove a point about the postmodern relationship between water and air, which can only be inferred from the actual fog event. The environmental conditions become favorable for the creation of fog. Variations in the composition of the air and water would return variations in the resulting fog, thus changing any inference you could make of the fog.  So, creation of the fog (and the variations of fog that could exist) begin to redefine and alter the environment, which in turn redefines how we understand the water and air. We’ll come back to this and more aquatic-themed analogies in a moment.

We can say the same of culture, which is purely defined by the environmental conditions in which it exists at a given moment in time. Something like the recent strikes in Gaza don’t necessarily happen randomly. There’s a complicated history involving knowledge of even more complicated socio-economic issues, more religious/cultural clashes, more geography, etc. Ad infinitum.

News updates about most recent policy decisions and military tactics don’t often enough recount that history. Too often when reports do try to give a back story, it gives insult to the phrase “scratching the surface.” History isn’t news, it’s olds. It’s like watching LOST in the middle of season three; You’d have no sense of place. It is exactly that sort of context that’s needed, what Jay Rosen describes as “explanatory journalism.” (Seriously, stop reading this and go read the CJR piece, if you haven’t yet).

Consider this piece about Salman Rushdie, fatwas, and the West’s undertanding of Muslim culture by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens takes the position that the ayatollah’s fatwa against Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses represents a point in time that helps define the wider cultural view of Islamic extremism we now understand. It carefully examines how one noteworthy piece of news in the literary world affects and was affected by the collapsing situation in Iran and how it relates to the West’s current dealings with Islam.

I’d like to think of news the same way I think of a Google map. Each news item we come across is a pinpoint fully zoomed in. Except we don’t have the best controls to see the relationships between news items. We can’t easily zoom out for a wider view. Explanatory journalism–that is, news items that step back to take a wider survey is a step in the right direction, giving news consumers one more control, allowing us to zoom out, but again, we’re stuck at the level of information provided in that individual explanatory piece. It is unreasonable to expect that one article fully explain every possible connection. I think we can do better. What if we could zoom around the map (metaphorically speaking, not necessarily graphically speaking)? A mind map, if you will, that allows us to start on the fog and zoom into the atomic structure of the air and out again to see how the fog interacts in greater weather patterns would be most useful.

Wikipedia works in a similar way. You can start on a page about fog and end up, through a series of links, on a page about the first World War. Explanatory journalism can only take us so far. There has to be a better solution that expands the reach of news items into other bisecting news items. If that can be accomplished through painfully complex meta-data, indexing algorithms, crowdsourced linking or what, I do not yet know the answer.

That might be the solution to stemming lost interest. When the next story breaks and the majority of people move on, they could keep that sense of place with them. They could understand how the new information relates to the previous information, even if on the surface the two items seem completely unrelated. And that’s how news becomes a bludgeoning device. The important information can wedge itself into the most recent popular information, where appropriate. Someone could easily drift from the latest celebrity rehab gossip to recent medical studies to recent policy.

I’m going to be blunt, so pardon my French (again): Yes, I’m suggesting we may be completely fucking wrong with the entire system of news. Right now, when a story breaks, it breaks like a wave. Over a period of time, it rises in interest and discussion, peaks and then drops down until the next break comes.  We do this over and over again, forcing readers to surf these waves, be they big national stories or be they hyperlocal news breaks, it doesn’t matter. The format is the same: A never ending flow of new information. Nobody questions its validity as a methodology. But it is, in fact, a staple of old media systems.

Traditional media, as I’ve explained before, are beholden to the limitations of their media. They have no sense of time. A newspaper is an individual physical product. Each issue is a stand alone product. Broadcast has it even worse off because they’re limited entirely to time itself, so if you miss a broadcast, it’s gone into the ether of history. Of course, these can also be advantages.

By focusing entirely on these waves of news, are we missing the entire ocean of information?

I don’t want to suggest that I think the waves are irrelevant. They’re not. We’re just missing out on a huge opportunity.

The end. Or is it?

Please leave a comment so I know what you think about this post. After that, check out It's randomonium! Or, if you're so inclined, take a gander at what I'm reading and my del.icio.us links.

Trackback URL: News as a bludgeoning device.

Tags: , , , ,