Media Has Been A Historical Fluke
I’m a student at the CUNY Graduate School of Social Journalism. This year is the third class of its kind. These are my thoughts about our first class in Community Engagement, a course led by Jeff Jarvis, the founder of the program.
‘Journalists talking about reinventing journalism’ is a far more inclusive discussion than you might think. In a forum without experts, I suppose it’s difficult to actually feel excluded.
This is a much-had conversation amongst journalists that revolves around the given we’ve all heard: the Internet has changed everything. How our new mediums have altered our reality, and how to adapt to it, is where the debate lies amongst media professionals.
Jeff Jarvis sees the solution as Social Journalism. He even founded a MA degree dedicated to the concept at the CUNY School of Journalism. I belong to the 3rd class.
Our first class was last week, led by Jarvis himself. The focus was on presenting Social Journalism within a greater historical context. There is no beginning or end in this timeline, just a middle.
Jarvis scribbled a cursive ‘g’ encased in a parenthesis on the whiteboard. Apologies to the journalists who already know about the Gutenberg Parenthesis, but for the novice, it’s a pretty cool concept. It’s also important in understanding the thought process behind Social Journalism.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis, coined by Thomas Pettit and Lars Ole Sauerberg, argues that the advent of the printing press in 1440 marked the beginning of when information had gatekeepers. A time when what was considered truth, depended on what was in text.
As Jarvis explained, far better than I, the truth was a bit more fluid before the printing press. It was subject to change depending on the person it flowed through. Information deemed important, by those with means, hired scribes or bards to document the account.
Now with the Internet, we have returned to the natural order that was temporarily stymied by Gutenberg’s invention. Information in many ways has been democratized again.
I’m definitely butchered this, so I ask you to read about the Gutenberg Parenthesis from those that invented the concept. Here are a few interesting excerpts from an interview conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review in 2013…
Pettit: “We are not just moving upwards and onwards, we are moving upwards and backwards. Even though it’s going to be much more technologically sophisticated from now on than it was 50 years ago, in many ways, we are going back to the way things were long before. This is the definition of a “parentheses.” It’s an idea, which interrupts an ongoing idea, and when the interruption’s over, the ongoing idea comes back”.
“The Middle Ages was not strong on membership of communities. They were not obsessive about inside versus outside. They didn’t emphasize, “I’m a denizen of this town, I’m a citizen of this country, I belong in this nation, behind these frontiers.” They saw themselves rather like Hobbits (Tolkien was a medievalist). Hobbits knew their relatives to the seventh degree: second cousins three times removed, and so on. In the Middle Ages people saw themselves as part of a network of connections. They knew their family trees. They knew with whom they were related. They identified themselves as a node in a network and they saw pathways, connections to other people in their extended family”……
Was the news better before the internet?
Was the state of ‘the news’ better during the Gutenberg Parenthesis? I personally have fond memories of the 1990s, but I was also really young. Advancements in technology have definitely made disseminating the ‘news’ easier compared to the largely oral medium of the medieval days. But was the ‘news’ in the newspaper truly relevant to the lives of the readers? Was the ‘real news’ being covered?
There is no shortage of examples of times when the entrusted 20th century gatekeepers of information omitted what some would deem to be ‘the real news’. The search for the ‘real news’ in many ways fueled Donald Trump’s ascendency. Unfortunately, a lot of the real news was fake.
But I don’t think these media institutions somehow became less ‘objective’ since the age of Edward Murrow and Cronkite. Social Journalism advocates that the standard of objectivity was a false one all along.
Critics see the motto of ‘serving communities’ as meaning that social journalists are advocate for the subjects who they cover. This interpretation is off the mark.
Social Journalism attempts to bridge the trust deficit with the public by offering ‘what they see’. Not an op-ed, but an account of a story without the magnanimous title of ‘objectivity’ or ‘unbiased’.
Text no longer equals truth, and journalists must adapt to this other side of the parenthesis. The dynamics of our media landscape in many ways resembles that of 500 years ago, however, now that we have social media and other online tools the reversion shouldn’t be too hard. I don’t know if Social Journalism is the remedy to the current chaos of media, but it certainly provides a convincing argument.