Would tv anchor Walter Cronkite have commented about entertainment news? Hardly. In the old media days, information was not as easy. We had to trust our news editors and journalists in print and electronic, to tell us what we needed to know. Magazines could entertain and those like Life magazine filled the gap. Serious "news" organizations (all of whom have cut back on
international bureaus) and cable shows choose to present stories, gatekeeping the news to maintain/get attention in order to attract/keep viewers and thus sell advertising. A huge amount of fluff - celebrity/entertainment stories are in the mix. Why? Because that is what we pay attention to. It is our fault, just as much as wanting to eat strawberries in winter and use plastic bags at the grocery store. It is easy, man.
Journalists have changed just as media has. Just see Dave Cohen's (journalism degree, Columbia) explanation of modern social media journalists.
But -- importantly, today facts are not "siloed" anymore, presented from top-down through a handful of sources we trust. Instead, information has been loosed and is mined and combined in a jillion ways with opinion, placement and presentation. There is not one in-the-box way to view the world that mass media gave us in the days when media rose to power and everyone tuned in...to basically the same (few) things. The flood of information can be, and is, overwhelming to many. So no wonder most of the magazine editorial content (and a big chunk of serious news content) is celebrity/entertainment news.
Information is everywhere, unbounded and uncontained. You know the saying, information yearns to be free. The more that is loosed and can be broadcast everywhere by anyone instantaneously, digitally and 24/7 (think of The Drudge Report or blog sites like Secrecy News where scientists prefer to share information), the more that powers try to contain facts (example, Osama et al, or the rise in classified information, or blog sites like Secrecy News).
Obama has been the only candidate to call for less secrecy and more transparency and Fred Thompson has a record (for openness) on this issue. This remains a still untouchable subject for the most part. Not Obama, but the topic he's taken up.
This makes truth fungible, open for interpretation and debate in
a way it hasn't been before. It also makes things more complicated.
Our ability to source facts is night and day today, 24/7 and the power
to digitally capture and share and create information is huge. The
little CIA robot dragonfly from the 1970s, above, could now
be gathering digital data with advances in technology. It isn't
illegal to capture the photos of people on the street. England has
street cameras everywhere. We just aren't used to it. Last spring I
took a big digitial camera, held the viewfinder to my eye and took
pictures of people in public for a class project on documentary-style
photography. People were bothered. I felt invasive. So I switched to
a tiny digital camera and I could take photos incognito, holding the
camera away from my eye, angled so I could not be facing the person,
look down at the digital screen to see what I was capturing. Dick
Cheney didn't want his home able to be captured on google maps. I
don't think he sunbathes nude and is sensitive to his photo being
captured and shared by anyone. I think he just understands these
issues.
I think the next big issues we'll face, culturally and socially, will be privacy and boundaries, secrecy and transparency. Skeletons or trade or personal secrets will be harder to keep in closets. Information. Sought. Bought. Created. Contained. Uncontained.
Power comes from the ability to capture attention (called the attention economy) and information is everywhere, harder to contain.
How will fragmentation make us cohesive? It won't. We're no longer homogenous. It is now all out-of-the-box, everywhere. Or is it? I just wonder if we are all too flooded with information and where the flood will take us? Will we turn off completely? Will we be willing to be completely transparent and open? If things can't be safely contained (nuclear, banking, secrets) where are we headed?
photo series, DragonSpies
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