Following news and blogs is one of those hot activities digital literati take at heart. Sometimes, the tens of millions sites worldwide and many more pages keeps me wondering as to their overall use, a little as if everyone on New York spoke up all at once… To be fair, as Internet can link me to any website in the world, at light speed or so, the current system suits me fine, not to mention that I am no geek to see what is next in technology. Yet one thing is sure : considering how my little lifetime has witnessed the successive births of fax, e-mails, internet, w3, mobiles, chats, fora, blogs, newsletters, RSS and the like, chances are we will keep on talking as much, if not more. That reminded me of this 20th century pun : “totalitarianism is shut up, democracy is keep talking”... That was for politics, but it also suits the media, and here is why.
I • Media Majors & Democracy
Informing is commendable, but media majors are now all happy and jumpy with the idea of hopping into bed together, thereby breaking the spirit of the U.S. Sherman Act and that of other anti-trust laws. It should be noted at this point that information is at the core of modern market economics : two tenets, nay, two founding hypothesis are atomicity of actors ( so no one can influence prices or society as a whole ) and both perfect & symmetric information : all knowledge is available & everyone knows it ( plus you know I know you know that I know you know...). That requires to keep sheer interest in knowledge and to ensure the system is secured. In his book Gag Rule, On the Stifling of Dissent and the Suppression of Democracy, Harper Magazine editor Lewis Lapham is one of the daring few to give a daunting and outspoken description of how the media are channelled nowadays, and their sources, unchallenged. Technology is not to blame, but rather how it is used. Moreover, according to him, neither citizens nor scholars seem to care about cross-checking or deepening the information poured on to them, to say nothing about their actually being interested in just the principle of verifying the whereabouts. Reasons are to be found both in intellectual apathy and the comfort of not raising un-PC questions or negative feedbacks.
This in turn leads to several questions :
1. in democracy, what are people interested in ?
2. in democracy, how do the media ensure people are informed ?
3. journalists often claim “People have the right to know”, but why should the media impose their interests if the ‘consumers’ are not interested ?
4. therefore, what is the compatibility of mass media and democracy ?
As with economics, research has long debated over this common nagging question on the independence of media and that of Central Banks ( such as the Federal Reserve ) : both these independences are theoretically and morally there to secure and optimise the system. Yet their instances and actions are neither elected, nor subject to democratic scrutiny : not only are they imposed on us, but We The People have no say, whether before or after, and that is that.
Now, information is often equalled with democratisation of media, which have sometimes been dubbed as the “Fourth Estate”, after the old tripartite division of society in Nobility, Church and Merchants. Well, the media certainly are a powerful estate in that they make the news, they decide what is a headline news and what is not worth mentioning, and when to break them to us ( or not ). And isn’t the World a rich place : everyday has its toll of good news to fill 60 minutes and the tabloids’ 64 pages or so... Those are some reasons why people tend not to trust the media as a whole, and welcome the sprout of the hundreds of millions of personal sites worldwide.
As the concept of Estates was Made in France, a reminder of the current situation there may be appropriate : nobility was officially trounced two centuries ago, and a century ago the Church was basically confined by law to janitor its precincts. So the media are an estate in this other way : people might listen to what they have to say, but not follow and even joke about them. That leaves the country with one estate only : the merchant class : what a coincidence ! It is the merchant class that sells or controls the media, the hardware, the internet providers, and most diffusion and distribution networks. Whatever its noble motives, that is its business at heart : earn enough to sustain itself and pay the thousands of salaries it hires. And to develop itself, the best way is still to buy all your pals’ shares, just as in Monopoly. Mergers & Acquisitions in the media are the rule, though somewhat less blatantly than in Italy, Spain or the UK, where media conglomerates now rule.
II • Media & Entropy
So what about democracy in grassroots media and personal websites run in the spare time ? By July 2006, Technorati was covering some 50 million blogs : supposing one were curious enough and wanted to have a quick glance at every such weblog, and assuming furthermore one has large bandwidth and restrains oneself to one second at every URL, that alone would require 1,000 days on a 10 hours daily basis, week-ends and holidays included. And that is only the top of the tip of the iceberg, as the rest of the world is in line still waiting for their turn : is it not just awesome how many people have things to say ? And the fact Web 2.0 is talked about so much only underlines how much people are interested in virtual media and how much they yearn for a system more customized to their likings. So, what shall we do with this opportunity the media gives us to shape the world we live in? That may require some clear objective for the future, something akin to Kennedy’s exhilarating “Last Frontier” ( the Apollo project ) to gather all the hundred millions of media users...
Nevertheless, much of the available information is redundant, either because watered down or because relayed on other sites ( quoting, syndication, links, newsletters, RSS, etc ). In a way, spread of information resembles what Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson says about ants ( one should also read his Consilience and On Hulman Nature ). When finding food, an ant leaves a scented trail which another soon follows thus doubling the scent, so that in no time more and more ants flock in, in a self-reinforcing boot-strapping mechanism until they form a full armada and clean up the place. That’s one way to modellise trendy information, you know the kind everyone talks about ( celebrities, news, politics ). The trouble is that as with everything in life, any information breakthrough has its own object-oriented devil ingrained in it : what were really good positive-discriminating tools ( links, RSS feeds ) are soon diverted to other ends, such as to increase visibility and page-rank. To make it short, this leads to white noise, a synonym to random walk after the property of light ( a sum of all wavelengths ). Because people are talkative ( and if you got here, you now know how much I am ), democratisation of media leads to exponential white noise.
There is no doubt modern media provide users with so much more information than ever before, at the personal level. At the world level however, that is unclear : with globalisation, people tend to embrace similar interests at the expense of particularisms. An example thereof is the difference of cultural/traditional diversity within the US and within patch-worked Europe, itself pretty homogeneous compared to what it was in the 18th and 19th centuries : Germany and Italy were not even unified for instance, and each of their territories had very different folklore and dialects. This naturally requires many caveats and robust research, but the trend towards homogeneity is clear. Yet, there is also little doubt we actually are less connected to each other : for one thing on Internet, we are not using any of our five natural senses, except the eye to recognize text, a very modern invention that lacks human touch. Images, webcams and Skype help somewhat, but they are nowhere near a table conversation. This not only shuns all body language which so often tells more than language per se and allows cross-checking, it also reduces global communication to a handful of tongues. And basically, to a same culture : browsers are chiefly English-speaking natives or have close affinities to their countries, by education, living, or habit. That is fine, but one should not forget who and how many are not connecting, and what is it we are not talking about.
III • Information & Quality
Last, I go for quality connections, but then qualifying quality becomes tricky : information depth and topics’ interest all depend on personal perception and culture, as much as on one’s interests and ability to infer or fathom by induction. I sometimes wonder how much I learnt from all my hours spent reading the media day after day… Those fields that so much further human knowledge ( technology, sciences, history ) are comparatively covered very little, or not at all. So most of what is said in the media is actually expectable, and support a basic truth : people talk about what they deem is important to them, and that can be cut down to a small number of ideas, infinite variations. Repeating one way or another, and having umpteen variations on a same theme, both have a name.
Despite its condescending acceptation, gossip serves a fundamental social function : to keep track of what others do, and that in turn often gives a feeling of community. No one likes secrets because they are perceived as eerie. At the national level, that has led to intelligence, to learn what the others are doing. Gossip may thus be older than trust in human history : how can trust breed if the others are withholding information ? Long gone are the times when tribes gathered and chatted round the fireplace and individuals told each other what they had leant in the course of the day. Now that humanity has expanded to all six continents, the media are a sophisticated variation thereof : tell everyone what is done in a particular place ( the Olympics for instance ). In terms of information flow, the media seem to be fostering worldwide gossip, and people like it. I do : need to hear people. Not everything, not everyone, but when and what I feel like.
The evolution of digital media in particular is then probably less in more information and new technologies, than in just better information. It is connectedness, not technology that is transforming society : connectedness is not just about multiplying connections, but also about securing a wide array of trustworthy and useful information, which in turn requires :
1. strong reporting and informed commentary, else information is superficial and hollow ;
2. synthesized information to the full to avoid yawns and ‘déjà vu’. Some people can read fast, very fast : JFK (again) could reportedly read all of the New York Times in 40 minutes, and remember it. That shows how the information is immersed in noise : new information is always little, but immersed in recalls of facts people actually have integrated already ;
3. communicate only when something really interesting, which understandably is not in the interest of periodicals. Or credibility suffers : I personally do not use RSS, because I make sure I visit every once in a while those sites I’m sure are consistent and only post when appropriate ;
4. targeting one’s interlocutors and topics.
So, all in all, whatever the new developments in the future, they shouldn’t overlook information quality, and should allow variable geometries to suit every possible profile. |
