,,,If they will never be seen?”
An interesting column on the problem of too much breaking eyewitness news, from Saturday’s FT here
PS- Some of those “media manipulators” she mentions will be dropping through next week.
One implicit conclusion about that “we need more filters” argument, and the point about U.S. coverage of foreign countries versus European coverage of foreign countries – any filter we design is likely to have its own biases (that would be why it’s called a filter, I suppose.) It’s best to build one acknowledging that.
Interesting too that bloggers in the U.S. tend to be covering the same things as the mass media. Does this mean we’re a culture that wants to comment on the status quo, not make it go away?
She comments on the irony of globalization, that “blogs from Ghana or Afghanistan might be floating around in cyberspace, but most Americans do not know where to find them, let alone want to read them”. The silo mentality of political “echo chambers” and preferences is only but a reflection of society, and questioning why human interaction should somehow appear more idealistic and utopian over the internet seems bizarre to me.
I agree; it is human nature to consume media in a manner which reaffirms your existing ideas. I think Quentin used this example in class, of how liberals watch NBC and conservatives watch Fox. There is an existing tendency to seek out familiar, agreeable channels, so why would the Internet be any different? However, I like the notion that we need more filters that make international bloggers more visible. If there were a site that brought together interesting local perspectives on global themes, events, or stories, that would be an excellent way to make these citizen bloggers, currently lost in cyberspace, more accessible to the American audience.
The most likely filter in foreign news will be one that seeks the emotionally provocative (the wounded child), or the exotic (the Mad Max quality of the citizens’ army). Those aren’t bad as illustrations of a crisis. The real challenge is developing information that keeps one interested and abreast of longer and deeper developments.
So far the Web is excellent at shocking, and at saying “No!” to things, from Al Queda (which hates the West) to Occupy (which hates the financial nexus) to Anonymous (which hates all sorts of systems of control) to Tahrir Square (which hate Mubarak). The trick so far seems to be developing communications systems that organize dispersed people with common interests to build something durable – though Kickstarter and other endeavors may provide some clues to that.
One idea I found particularly interesting is that of individuals clustering into “tribes” on the internet, looking at and creating digital information in line with their “culture”. In line with this idea, the concept of randomization, or lack thereof, immediately came to mind. If we want to see something on the internet, we punch it in our keyboards and we instantly receive it on our screens. Pre-computers, the experience of flipping through pages of a dictionary to find how “semiotics” is defined would have included the act of bumping into and perhaps learning other words. In the digital landscape, we seem to always get what we want, but the lack of randomization makes it only easier to fall into the narrow depths of the collective mind (such as the homogenous, American media).