Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

News is what is happening wherever the television camera is pointing. Many more "cameras" (i.e. reporting capabilities among observers with access to instantaneous communications) means much more comes to the consciousness of the rest of us. In the earlier days of so-called coverage, we believed that what we saw was all that was happening. Over time, we will begin to learn how to assimilate much more of what is actually happening as parts of larger patterns in the world. It's a different sort of sense-making, one that is not consistent with the way most of us have been trained to construct knowledge.

I think your dilemma is that you are a well-trained, literate (read: visual) man, as am I. I'll try to meet you back here 150 years from now when all the well-trained people are trained in audility/tactility and the emerging types of connections enabled in a UCaPP* world. What seems scary and dangerous to you now will then be the normal shape of the world.

*UCaPP = Ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate.

"News is what is happening wherever the television camera is pointing."

Even more so to the point of what we choose to see and how we choose to see it.

We need to respect diversity and the differing viewpoints of the world. Just because you see something from your viewpoint, doesn't mean the rest of the world will see it that way as well.

Mark, I don't take this as a dilemma because I'm not arguing in favor of "coverage." Rather, I think this noble journalistic ideal is a myth. The question is what will replace it. Yes, new types of sense-making. But what types? And, if the mass media has implicitly been a force of totalization (in the PoMo sense), how are we going to pull ourselves together in a post-totalized world?

My post intended to raise "coverage" as an idea we have to give up...a path we're already well down.

What will replace coverage? I think the more salient question is, what has replaced traditional coverage. Part of the answer has to do with emergent patterns arising from collective authority and knowledge construction (that I write much more about here).

As people slowly begin to give up the notion of implicit credibility of the traditional newsmedia, and as partisanship becomes increasingly obvious (and increasingly discoverable - viz. Swift Boat Veterans), any individual's conception/construction of the little-t truth of a situation will develop like an old Polaroid print - fuzzy at first, with increasing clarity and resolution over a relatively short time - from the diverse sources of points of information. These include everything from traditional news-gathering and disseminating organizations, to on-the-spot bloggers and video/audio capturers, to Menippean satirists (like Jon Stewart) who help to reveal non-obvious contexts, to the rest of us in the blogosphere who masticate the raw materials from all of the above.

How are we going to pull ourselves together? Like the commercial for dish soap, "you're soaking in it." And you are part of it. The traditional massmedia are increasingly taking their cues from those who collaborate online. With some notable exceptions, they have lost their ability to do important investigative journalism, or in-situ reportage from hot spots (eg. Iraq and New Orleans; in both places, movement was largely controlled by military, admittedly in the former locale more than the latter.)

Many people who are today under 20 are becoming used to the idea of constructing their own view and understanding of the world, and being skeptical of what is prepackaged and slickly delivered. As an aside, I disagree with the critique of the so-called Daily Me, and the arguments around echo chamber effects. These are literate/visual dominant constructs. I give far more credit to those who are acclimatized to immersion in an acoustic space environment.

Homonyme Alert! I assume "2", you assume "1".

"Coverage (1)" is not "Coverage (2)".

"Coverage "1" is defined as "truly COVERING
the worlds noteworthy events; a.k.a.
comprehensive selection of events.

"Coverage "2" is defined in terms of reporting
on one isolated event. i.e. "reportage".