The Press in the Era of Emerging Narratives
One of the main changes the Internet era brought about has to do with the way power works. For a large part of our history, very few people had access to some of the most powerful tools available to humanity: armies, school systems, churches, and the means to print. Individuals who could wield the power of such tools were those who took decisions that could affect the rest of the population. Talking about those decisions was somewhat linear. The king declares war to another country. Clean, simple story. The church issues new rules. One simple headline.
Occasionally, human societies faced more complex situations, where movements would emerge from a sentiment brewed by a collective — the French Revolution being one of the most striking examples — and create a mass movement for change thanks to the power of many people together. In cases like these, even if leaders were there and occupied prominent positions, stories were less linear, less clean to tell: they were the result of multiple narratives, intentions and influences clashing together, and tracing this kind of narratives in a linear fashion betrays the complexity of what they say.
Today, a lot of stories work like that. The #metoo movement, started with a series of articles about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual aggressions, is the latest example of this phenomenon. Shortly after the first articles were published, new allegations concerning other public figures came to light, mostly through Twitter and other social platforms. The movement, leaderless and decentralised, led to movies being changed, TV shows being cancelled, and careers being obliterated. The way this has happened is far from being linear: rather, it takes the form of a series of separate stories colliding with each other.
This is what now is being called an emergent movement. A good explanation of Emerging System is found in Joi Ito and Jeff Howe’s book “Whiplash”.
In traditional systems, from manufacturing to government, most decisions are made at the top. While employees may be encouraged to suggest products and programs, it’s the managers and other people in authority who consult with experts and decide which of the suggestions to implement. This process is usually slow, encrusted in layers of bureaucracy, and encumbered by a conservative proceduralism. Emergent systems presume that every individual within that system possesses unique intelligence that would benefit the group. This information is shared when people make choices about what ideas or projects to support, or, crucially, take that information and use it to innovate.
Emergent movements contain multitudes: #metoo has sparked many discussions between long-time feminists and younger activists. A notable debate among participants in the movement has been sparked by French actress Catherine Deneuve, who voiced the concern that the movement might end up being a force pushing for puritanism. Deneuve’s remark is just one example of many opinions circulating around the movement, inside and outside of it, from country to country, culture to culture. #metoo made the cover for The Times’ “Person of the Year” issue, but it’s a fluid and dynamic phenomenon, extremely hard to sum as a whole. Similar observations can be made for other movements, like Black Lives Matter, Gamergate, the Alt-Right, the Indignados.
Covering Emerging Systems
Since each one of us, in the age of social media, has become a broadcaster, wielding a power to communicate that was unthinkable even for billionaires until some decades ago, emerging narratives are becoming more and more common, and might actually end up outnumbering the linear narratives we were used to. A necessary question follows: do journalists actually know how to deal with them? And, more importantly, is the structure of a news report the right tool to tell those stories?
The usual five W — Who, What, Where, When, Why — suppose a very specific and bounded kind of fact, something with a clear and definite subject, an action, a place and a time. But if we think of something like the #metoo movement, those categories are not enough. Opinion pieces regarding those movements often try to make sense of them as centralised phenomena, using hashtags and mottos as one would use the name of a political party. But #metoo is a movement with no structure, no proper funding members, no manifesto.
It seems like the complexity of communication in the Internet era cannot come to terms with the need of news outlets to share their stories through clear, punchy headlines and coherent narratives. This is clearing the way for new ways of communicating with media, like YouTube news channels, whose popularity is steadily rising, especially among younger viewers: YouTubers like Philip De Franco are developing highly interactive daily news broadcasts, which are viewed by more than a million people. De Franco’s numbers often are way bigger than CNN’s. While these new and disruptive broadcasters lack the kind of authority legacy media enjoyed, legacy media in turn often struggle to understand how new forms of communication are impacting on the media landscape. What we lack is a bridge between old and new media.
For the time being, clear solutions have not appeared on the horizon yet. Hopefully we will find them with time. In the meantime, we could start by clarifying one ground rule of communication in the era of emerging narratives: focus on single stories and treat them as such, without forcing them into a larger discourse if their connection to other stories is not clear. In a way, we need a shift in ambition: for a long time, the press presented itself as the herald of the capital-T “Truth”; instead, modern times are showing that each of us has its own perception of the truth, and crucial to find a collective and shared truth is the ability to communicate our point of view, to read the media landscape around us, to share and discuss consciously. An allegedly clear and monolithic narrative, in the context of emerging narratives, is not very useful to explain complex situation. Rather, it is applicable to specific, smaller contexts.
Revolutions are not linear: they arrive from different places, all merging together. The revolution we are living today, the Internet revolution, is no exception. As many others before, it is an an ongoing revolution, one that never seems to stop, and one that we should learn how to tell in the best possible way.
Emilio Bellu, Go Think Initiative Vice-Chairman and Media Director.
