The other day I'm on the treadmill and I'm watching the TV monitors hanging from the ceiling: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox were all on. As I watched the odd behavior and even odder reporting of the talking heads, I became convinced that the news has changed.
There seems to have been a time when the purpose of the news was to get us in touch with reality, report on what is happening.
After watching Fox report on how Obama is losing so many jobs (in a recession that began before Obama was even nominated by his party) and CNN speculate on whether Michael Jackson's ex-wife will sue for custody of kids we average Americans would not recognize even if they ended up on our porch selling cookies, I can only conclude that reality has become too much. Now even the news has to perform the task previously reserved for TV sitcoms, soap operas, and movies: it has to give us an escape from reality.
Color me strange, but for all my day dreaming, I've always kind of liked reality. Too bad the TV producers don't think I can handle it anymore.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Showing posts with label cnn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cnn. Show all posts
05 July 2009
19 April 2009
The Bubble Media - A History of the Future
It turned out to be a simple thing, really: there just was not enough demand for facts to sustain profitable news organizations. CNN laid off a large group of science writers. Newspapers closed. As blogging became easier, the ratio of people writing to the facts actually reported reached an historic high. And then went higher. It was a bubble waiting to pop.
Some folks were happy to hear that all religious people were nuts. Facts were fabricated, distorted, and filtered to support this viewpoint. Others were eager to hear about how distorted and fabricated is science. More facts were fabricated to support this. The market provided facts for which there was demand.
As it turns out, there was no real demand for the truth. The truth was too messy to neatly fit into any one theory or viewpoint. It was not simple. It didn't really support anything as simplistic as conservative or liberal, material or spiritual distinctions. Tolerance for the facts required a kind of tolerance for ambiguity and lack of resolution that most people found distasteful. TV news was always secondary to the drama, comedies, and entertainment on TV. But once newspapers dissolved in the early part of the 21st century, movies became the preferred form of news: by contrast to actual events, movies offered revenge for the oppressed, engaging and attractive personalities, discernible plot lines, and resolution in less than 2 hours. The way that past generations had clung to tribal myths and persecuted those who might advocate the empirical method, the developed world began to cling to movie myths at the expense of reality and people who struggled to report it.
In this sense, the 21st century did turn out to be the virtual reality century. What few had considered was that this virtual reality would use humanity's oldest operating system: the belief systems and imagination of groups.
It was this decay in thinking and disconnection from facts that, finally, undermined society. Not war. Not climate change. Not discrimination or financial collapse. It was, instead, simply a growing disinterest in the facts. Pity, really, because it had been a wonderful civilization.
Some folks were happy to hear that all religious people were nuts. Facts were fabricated, distorted, and filtered to support this viewpoint. Others were eager to hear about how distorted and fabricated is science. More facts were fabricated to support this. The market provided facts for which there was demand.
As it turns out, there was no real demand for the truth. The truth was too messy to neatly fit into any one theory or viewpoint. It was not simple. It didn't really support anything as simplistic as conservative or liberal, material or spiritual distinctions. Tolerance for the facts required a kind of tolerance for ambiguity and lack of resolution that most people found distasteful. TV news was always secondary to the drama, comedies, and entertainment on TV. But once newspapers dissolved in the early part of the 21st century, movies became the preferred form of news: by contrast to actual events, movies offered revenge for the oppressed, engaging and attractive personalities, discernible plot lines, and resolution in less than 2 hours. The way that past generations had clung to tribal myths and persecuted those who might advocate the empirical method, the developed world began to cling to movie myths at the expense of reality and people who struggled to report it.
In this sense, the 21st century did turn out to be the virtual reality century. What few had considered was that this virtual reality would use humanity's oldest operating system: the belief systems and imagination of groups.
It was this decay in thinking and disconnection from facts that, finally, undermined society. Not war. Not climate change. Not discrimination or financial collapse. It was, instead, simply a growing disinterest in the facts. Pity, really, because it had been a wonderful civilization.
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