The onus on learning and knowing the important things one needs to know to be a responsible citizen-- by making news consumption more active with online options -- is like trying to take a sip of water from a gushing fire hose. It is mentally overwhelming and physically challenging. At the same time, it can be more refreshing than we ever expected it to be.
Davis S. Hirschman wrote an interesting piece in Editor and Publisher titled Sink or Skim. He says he wasn't always a media junkie but these days he feels as if he must know more, even if is on a minimal level, about what is going on everywhere.
"...but for the most part, if I want to keep up, I don't have time. I'm not sure how healthy all of this is. ...Sometimes I wonder how much of my brain is being taken up by this news-knowledge. Could this be taking up space that should be devoted to more pressing things?"
He talks of a friend who doesn't keep up with current affairs. I, too, have a friend who, when I mentioned Valerie Plame, asked me if that was the girl in Aruba. It is easy to give in to the entertaining and distracting information that is called *news* but yet have little knowledge about things that we really need to know.
We are bombarded with trivia and minutia in ever-increasing media channels. Are we distracted to know things broadly rather than intelligently? For those who have been used to actively seeking knowledge and truths, keeping up feels more like trying to tread water in a baby pool...it might be easier to just forget it all and float rather than taking hold of and learning how to apply the tools needed to move the bottom of the pool to a deeper and more manageable level.
The media are confusing. All of a sudden, the opportunity exists for the audience seeking information, with blogs and online outlets, to become active rather than passive consumers of news. The chaos and frenzy of this change is overwhelming but it has allowed the watchdog function of the press/media to regain its stature - both online and in traditional media.
Frank Rich, in a New York Times article last weekend (available to subscribers only), defended newspapers for fulfilling their mandate to check institutional power and he attacked governmental institutional powers for deflecting blame by pointing the fault to the media. Editor and Publisher ran an article about it, writing that "Rich also suggests that perhaps the recently exposed NSA database on phone records 'may have more to do with monitoring *traitors* like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists. Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason.' It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about."
The mandate of a free press, precarious in recent times, is gaining ground as more active news consumers search out information and information is no longer top-down -- therefore becoming less vulnerable to spin. The options available to consumers offer alternatives for truth twistication. The conversations that take place in the new civic spaces online are participatory and allow for deconstruction and debate. The tools for seeking more knowledge online are allowing for greater engagement in learning than media have provided in the past.
Are we drowning, or just going through the disruptive and unsettling technological rapids to the calmer waters of a more enlightened age?
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