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| Image Credit: 80000hours.org |
Philosopher Alain de Botton gave a lecture on Journalism and popular culture. Here is my interpretation and adaptation of what he said:
News is the last thing many of us see at night and the first thing we hear in the morning. We are constantly in contact with it.
News: what is it? Is it only information?
The great hope and promise of news, in the 19th century, was that enough of it would enlighten and liberate us. People thought that the abundance of news would make us freer and smarter. As it turns out, it is not as simple as that.
How the Flood of Information Dulls Our Thinking
There are two ways to keep a population uninformed: (a) suppress the news with an iron fist, as dictators and totalitarians have done for years or (b) make news so abundant that the population is unable to keep up with it, process it, or sift through it, separating the significant from the trivial, as we do in our "free" societies.
News is actually more than mere information; it is how we figure out what matters and what our lives mean. News helps us, for better or for worse, to process our experiences in life. This was a role that religion used to play, and needs to play again. As it stands news, in all of its fragmentation and amorality, shapes our understanding of reality.
The news always presents itself as being “new”, but actually the stories that appear on the news are not that new; they are largely the re-packaging of the same thirty or so archetypal stories that have been in circulation since the dawn of time.
Why Consumers of Popular Media Lose Sight of What is Important
Our assumption is that the news is about the important stuff; but so much that is important is not even covered by the news. It is a mistake to assume that if you watch and read the news you will keep up with everything that is important and, conversely, that if something is not covered by the news it is not important. Some of the most important events and experiences in life never appear on the news.
We Have to Learn How to Package Important Ideas and Information
The assumption used to be that if you had important information and made it available to the public it would enter into the popular consciousness and politicians would be forced to respond to it. This was thought to be the way an open society brings about progressive social change. This assumption should now be questioned, especially now, in the era of information overload.
We also have a cultural bias, in Western society, to believe that everything that is important is current and everything that is current is important. We are such a future-oriented society that we have lost the capacity to enter into history and to salvage its richness and wisdom. Yet it is the richness and wisdom of the past that will be essential for any successful effort to navigate our way into the future.
What enters the popular consciousness these days is not important information, but celebrity appeal and “cute babes.” One cannot assume that the public will be interested in important information just because it is made available to them.
But the appeal of celebrities and cute babes have always been the subjects that have preoccupied the public consciousness. In the past, however, religions have known how to package important ideas in popular images in order to “sell” them. Today we forgotten the importance of making important ideas and information attractive and interesting to average consumer of ideas.
Why We Don’t Care When Tragic Things Happen in Unfamiliar Lands
We have to recapture the art of telling stories. In order for a tragedy to feel tragic to the general public the public must first care about the people to whom the tragedy occurs -- in other words, they have to know them. Few people care about the deaths of people they never even knew existed before they found out they were dead. The audience has to see people in normal times before they care about what happens to them in abnormal times.
The other side of this problem is that, because of our selective attention, we usually don’t learn much about many parts of the world until there is a disaster there. The disaster becomes our first introduction to the people who live there and we find it hard to empathize with those people because the abnormal situation is all that we know about them and the abnormal begins to seem, to us, to be normal for them.
There is a Difference Between Good Photojournalism and Lifeless Images
The solution to the problem may be that storytellers will have to be more artistic; they will have to find ways to present more information in their images and stories. This is the difference between good photojournalism and dead photographs. A good photojournalist's image is one where the viewer learns something new by looking at the image. It advances the viewer's knowledge. A dead photograph, on the other hand, merely corroborates what the viewer already knows.
Images should be agents of information for us, but instead, in popular media, they tend to be bland and lifeless. They simply reinforce what we already know.
Why We Believe Our Society is Sicker than it Really Is
The new features in social media, such as the comments sections below content that is posted, present an image of society that makes us seem nastier people than we really are. People are nastier in their internet personas and in their anonymity than they are during face-to-face encounters in everyday life.
Perhaps this nastiness may be understood as being analogous to what people write in personal diaries and journals. The reason we are afraid to show other people our diaries and journals is because we usually write in them when we are at our emotional low points. Once we recover, we realize that what is in the journal is not really us, and if an outsider were to read our journals that person would think we lived a very sad, lonely and depressed life.
The comments section of online media is "below the line" media discourse. Below the line in the media does not really represent who we are -- it shows us at our nastiest and our worse. In addition, the stories that get the most coverage in the news make it seem as though our society has gone completely insane. Tragic stories, in the media, catch our attention.
Why Tragic Stories, Properly Told, Make Us Healthy
A tragedy, properly understood, is a way of narrating a momentary loss of control that brings the hero down. We are drawn to tragedies because we are drawn to stories about heroes with fatal flaws that become their undoing. These stories attract us because we are therapeutically impacted by them. They help us to realize how close we all are to disaster, and this realization humbles us, makes us more empathetic and kinder to each other.
Tragic stories should be agents of civilization for us; but in today’s popular media they become gratuitous horror and make us fearful of each other. They tend to harden our hearts.
The news treats tragic stories as if they will encourage the total breakdown of society when a tragic story, properly told, actually increases the bands of civility. The news doesn’t really seem to trust us to be able to handle the narration and depiction of tragic events. They do not want us to see ourselves in tragic figures, for fear that this will lead to breakdown of society and mass lawlessness. Ironically, this is precisely what the presentation of tragic stories would prevent.
The reason why we are fascinated by tragic scenes, chaos and death is not because we sick and morbid, it is because we are trying to make sense of the meaning of our lives. The thought of death helps us to focus on what really matters. The tragic provokes, in us, a memory of death, which actually makes us saner and more human.
How Unreasonable Fear and Unreasonable Optimism Alienate Us from Ourselves
But popular media play too much on our fears. The image of humanity that appears in popular media encourage us to fear one another. We get an exaggerated sense of the sickness of humanity.
After being bludgeoned with stories and images that inspire fear in us -- giving us an excessively pessimistic view of humanity -- the media turn around and give a few stories of exaggerated hope. The hope is always centered on new discoveries based on science and technology. These are stories of miracle cures for diseases and silver bullets and “science-based methods” to solve all of the world’s social problems. These stories are as unrealistic in their optimism and the tragic stories are in their pessimism.
In contrast, the Christian narrative is that we are fallen people, we are imperfect and we are extremely vulnerable. This narrative fits the norm, whereas the images of an artificial “perfection” in the media give us an unreasonable and unrealistic lens on our lives and distorts our sense of meaning. Popular media distort our sense of perspective.
Why Healthy People in a Healthy Society Always Need Good Role Models
Connected with this distorted sense of perspective is our obsession with the wrong celebrities. Throughout human history people have always been obsessed by the equivalent of today’s celebrities, even if the “celebrities” in antiquity, for example, were the pantheon of mythical gods or the lives imputed to rulers who were practically deities.
A healthy society needs healthy role models. The problem with our celebrity culture is not that we are focused on celebrities, and tend to model ourselves after them, it is that we are focused on the wrong celebrities and they make lousy role models. We do not create ourselves, whole cloth, out of nothing -- we always take our guidance from the example of someone else. We should be very careful, therefore, to whom we expose ourselves and whom we pattern ourselves after.
How Envy Can Either be Potent or Impotent
Popular media also encourage us to envy. Envy is not, in itself, an unhealthy emotion, so long as we are able to examine our envy and learn from it. What is it that we admire in the people we envy? What is our connection to them? How can we learn, grow, and become better persons as a result of our admiration of them?
Envy should be a clue to what we should or could be doing to improve ourselves. At the very least, envy should help us to understand ourselves better.
Popular media, however, do not encourage this positive notion of envy. Media put people in front of us who have achieved extraordinary things, yet there is no connection between them and us. Media suppress what we might have in common with the people we admire, there is no bridge between where they are in life and where we are. This leaves us with nothing other than envy.
How Bias can Either Bring People Together or Drive them Apart
Popular media are also afraid of bias. There is a sense that media content should be artificially “objective”. Bias, however, is not inherently bad. Bias, properly understood, is a perspective -- it is a point-of-view. Bias is an angle on events and circumstances. One should not be afraid of bias, rather one should be able to distinguish between good bias and bad bias. The bias that media should be promoting is a bias toward what we all have in common; a bias that brings us together. Media bias should emphasize our commonality.
Popular media, afraid as it is of bias, steers away from the big questions such as: What is the meaning of life? How can we make our lives more purposeful? How can we make this a better world? Media are afraid that to ask these questions is to be vulnerable to accusations of media bias -- and also to being called a “Marxist”.
How Popular Media Prevent People from Thinking Systemically
We have reached the point where the assumption in media is that one must either ratify the status quo or one must be a “dangerous revolutionary”. It is an either-or proposition; there is no room for improving the system beyond tinkering around the edges.
Likewise, the popular media are obsessed with “bad eggs”. They present our problems and situations as though they are created by individual actors who need to be identified, captured, and put into prison -- then everything will be all right. The problem with this paradigm is that it ignores the systemic nature of our problems. It over-simplifies the notion of bad actors, acting on their own, while ignoring how social systems cultivate such bad actors in the first place.
The media gravitate to “neat stories”. Media do not like complexity and they do not like ambiguity. They want to identify a single person, causing a problem, and put that person away forever and believe that the problem will be solved.
And Finally....
It is important to spend time away from the news. A news Sabbath is a good idea. We need time to be left alone with our thoughts -- time when our thinking is not constantly being conditioned by popular media. At first we might find this boring -- or frightening, but eventually we will see things that we never would have noticed or thought about otherwise. We need a break to refresh ourselves, recharge our batteries and get a clearer sense of perspective on what is actually important.
Related Post: Journalism and the Need to Tell Ourselves Better Stories, in Transcendence journal
