Linguistic Alchemy
May 25th, 2008 |
Jon Taplin has a post today on journalism’s future (a topic about which he’s uniquely qualified to address).
Everyone knows the future of journalism is on the web, but just putting the New York Times print edition on the web is not transformative.
I think what is transformative is the work Frontline, the PBS series has been doing in integrating broadcast and web resources into some new hybrid of journalism. The best example is the Interactive video timeline they created around their epic series Bush’s war. The ability to navigate through both the video assets, the interview transcripts and search by individual participant seems to me to get close to the promise of truly interactive television.
His post harkens back to a post I read earlier this week on the Daily Kos, in which Kos targets a line in a NBC press release about how the network “as part of a free press in a free society, makes its own editorial decisions.”
Once upon a time, there were time constraints on the air, or space constraints in print. But these days, unedited footage and transcripts can be posted online. Those “editorial decisions” are nothing more than editorial meddling, gatekeeping at its worst.
There’s no reason for NBC to hide the rest of the footage. Put it all online. Let people decide for themselves whether Bush was improperly edited or not. Do the same for all interviews.
[...] It won’t just help generate a more informed electorate, but it will provide a fantastic accountability for those journalists themselves—with the source material available, their ability to skew their pieces according to their own biases will be seriously restricted.
Taplin’s and Kos’s visions share two commonalities: increased availability of content, and increased consumer autonomy. The Internet provides the opportunity for both, and exemplary online operations such as PBS and the Daily Kos take advantage.
I worry, though, that this elysian digital frontier will butt up against basic social psychology. Brains are extraordinary things. They process input at a prodigious rate and perform an estimated 10^16 operations per second, of which we are only aware of a small fraction.
Yet our capacities are finite, and for hundreds of thousands of years the ability to take mental shortcuts has been naturally selected.
This shortcut-taking tendency is the engine behind a whole host of social processes, from prejudicial behavior to logical fallacies. The same neurological phenomenon that serves us so well in discarding unremarkable information can also lead us considerably astray in a wide variety of situations.
This judgmental impairment is especially relevant here, where we are consistently taught that we Americans, by forming our own assessments and exercising our own judgments in the political realm, provide a crucial check and balance in our democratic process.
We want to believe that we can comprehend the best direction for our country, no matter how bewildering and complex the domestic and geopolitical climates appear at first blush. The mainstream media provides that service by condensing these monumental issues into simplistic language and broad plot devices familiar to any member of our culture.
As a nation, we believe that this linguistic alchemy is possible, and moreover, that it’s all we require to make an informed decision. So we pick presidents based on who we’d rather down a pint with, perform acts of monstrous reductionism with regard to Muslims, and scapegoat subpopulations for their supposed failure to adhere to our idiosyncratic standards.
The mere presence of more content, or better delivery, won’t eradicate this pretentious social norm. Although those who already challenge themselves by absorbing as much information as possible will continue to flock to these new media, the majority of us will continue to consume the most bite-sized morsels of information we can find, even if we’re unknowingly seduced into believing biased or naive reports, and even if we have the opportunity to gain a fuller picture simply by logging on.
What psychology and sociology giveth, new infrastructures or media can’t taketh away.
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