Citizen Journalist: Riding the Spike
Our present moment is a strange one — awesome, dizzy and breakneck, edgy with the sense were are headed toward a cliff we can’t see over. What kind of local beat is that?
Significant challenges to the fabric of everyday life appear to be spreading everywhere at once.
Washington seems hopelessly broken and now the democracy it is serves is facing its greatest challenge from an authoritarian alternative channeled by a boor.
The global environment we depend upon for our daily food and water is transforming so fast that scientists can’t keep up with the data’s ever direr implications. (Just last week, new research published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics warns that nations are not moving fast enough to curb fossil fuel emission and the world is on a verge of abrupt climate shift now decades, not centuries, away.)
Digital media is disrupting many industries, but never one so close to home as newspapering. About 1,000 journalism jobs are now being shed every month as the remaining players swirl round and the drain. So far, the only ones who have profited on the Internet’s apotheosis in everyday life are the tech companies and platforms which feed it to us.
The weird thing about tipping points is that you never see them until they appear in the rear-view mirror and suddenly it’s water, water everywhere.
Well, we have ourselves to blame. In his new book The Internet of Us, Michael Patrick Lynch argues that the flood of digital information — which he calls Google knowledge — has grown to tsunami-proportions and has overwhelmed our cognitive capacities, reducing our ability to reason and make individual choices. The result is a growing unknowing, a digital divide separating ourselves from our own minds.
At the same time it is creating polarized tribes of belief wholly cut from discourse with the mainstream. We are so dependent now upon our digital media that other ways of finding out things — like looking for a phone number in a telephone book, or getting the feel of the ground beneath our feet — are vanishing. Were we to lose our Internet access due to cyberattack or some natural disaster, we would go suddenly blind — cut off from the input that has become our sole access to the world. (Go outside and play, Lynch argues. We know the world with our senses and intuitions.)
In a telling sense, we are drowning in a rising tide of information we no longer have the capacity to understand, much less know.
To wit: The sum of information from the dawn of human time to the year 2003 was calculated to be about 5 Exabytes (1 billion gigabytes). By 2010, that amount of information was calculated to double every two days. By 2013 the sum was 1,200 exabytes and now the sum is measured in zetabytes.
And — is there room for more? — all this is transpiring when we’re streaming straight up the datastream of knowledge available through digital means. Ray Kurzweil estimates that in 35 years, human knowledge will be a quadrillion (that’s one thousand million million) times more advanced than it is now.
And if the human mind is poorly designed for absorbing so much data, our human time is even less capable of reacting to these changes fast enough. Copyright law is desperately in need of an update for the Internet Age, but courts move in years what transforms now in days. Ditto for corporate antitrust laws which used to make sense in the old media market, but now just seem content to hammer the nails of doom into the coffins of the few still desperately trying to survive. (Tribune recently hoped to purchase the Orange County Register out of bankruptcy court, attempting to congeal what’s left of a shattered southern California newspaper market, but the feds sued.)
One of the axioms of digital disruption is that it changes not only the ground on which companies compete, but also the rules. Media, telecom, financial services, retail, technology, insurance, education, health care, industry — every one of these industries are fighting for a fast-vanishing purchase on ever-disappearing gains. And for what? To the disruptor go a fast profit and then nothing. Amazon, the great retail disruptor, had $35 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of 2015, but only $482 million in profit. Enough to put just about every other retailer into a tailspin, for spoils mostly destined to Jeff Bezos’ portfolio.
Imagine you are standing on the deck of a ship that has encountered a wave that grew and grew until the ship’s screws were clawing madly to find a way clear a crest dizzying ever higher out of sight. That would be one scary boat ride, wouldn’t it?
But that’s exactly where we are right now, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to get off that boat.
And the spike gets ever more straight-up with every next sentence you read.
II.
You would expect to be seeing collateral damage every where you look now, and sure enough you would if your attentional apparatus wasn’t suffering target fixation with that dizzy crest up there. We’re just trying to keep from flipping over.
But it’s happening. Chunks are falling off everywhere, some big as the West Antarctic shelf which, we learn, is cracking and wobbling hard. In the global warming research released last week, accelerated meltwater from Greenland is weakening the internal current in the Atlantic Ocean which helps keep weather across the world temperate. Shut down that current and the Arctic stays cold and the southern regions keep heating up, brewing monster storms capable of hurling ocean boulders hundreds of feet into the air and flooding coastal cities by the end of this century.
We now approach an era of perfect storms, giant floes and boulders the size of Magog’s toes.
Why can’t we see all these jagged shelves now bobbing in the flow? It’s just that our attentional filters are so shredded that only the digital mainstream is familiar. It’s like the myth of suburbia, that gauzy ’50s second-to-third martini golden glow woven by calm furniture in islanded houses, Ink Spots on the Magnavox and the wife making dinner. The Matrix as the malware which sucks away our life’s blood to the tune of “Street of Dreams.”
Global warming has begun the sixth greatest extinction of life in Earth’s history — according to some estimates, by the end of this century some 20 to 50 percent of all living species will be lost. Millions of human inhabitants of flooding coastal areas will soon be on the move, swamping the resources of their wealthier nations. Storms are getting meaner, floods and drought devastating further and longer. Walls will rise higher as self-interest grows ever callous.
Shakeouts from global warming are also hitting capitalist interests in the gut. The coal industry is collapsing and small- to mid-size oil concerns suffering from historic low oil prices are defaulting on loans that were thrown out willy-nilly with the abandon of subprime mortgage loans a decade ago. (Who would have thought oil would ever have gone down?) And imagine the angst of South Florida developers when they look at their 2-trillion dollar Miami investment. Macro-economic interests in the U.S. look better than elsewhere in the world in 2016, but wage stagnation and income disparity affects an ever-larger share of what used to be called the middle class.
Digital disruption is making billions for the unicorns while putting everyone else out of work. Catastrophic losses have sent the newspaper industry into a death spiral it can’t get out of. (So far this year, journalism jobs are being cut at a rate of 1,000 a month) The music industry is suffering the same fate as fast and cheap streaming digital media replaces everything else. Online merchants are disrupted the brick-and-mortar chain stores that gobbled up the independents. The auto industry is about to be disrupted. 3D printing is disrupting manufacturing. And when these employers have been replaced by tiny, efficient tech houses, where will those millions of disrupted workers find work?
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, six million Americans lost their jobs and eight million lost their homes. Only one banker was prosecuted for the great fraud on mortgage savings, an investment strategist in Switzerland. Recovery wasn’t difficult for the banks as no real consequences were suffered—not like in the lower middle class where industries broke loose and scattered in the tide. Risky financial instruments were tabled for a while and then renamed for present use, finding fresh ways to bet against the country’s financial health. The banking industry is more robust than ever, and unemployment nationwide is down to 8-year lows.
Perhaps It is the disconnect between macro- and micro-economics — the shine of the marketplace compared to the webs in my wallet — that suggests what we see and what we get are permanent symptoms of American despair.
III.
America is now as much about the disrupted as the departed, though they are linked in vast ways. Mortality rates for white middle-aged Americans are skyrocketing. Two million vets of the ten-year Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are raising the cost of war by magnitudes as they carry their wounds forward. Chronic alcoholism is claiming more than ever, and opiate addiction — first pain pills, now heroin — is the number one killer of youth. And now there’s a new drug called fentanyl that is cheaper than heroin and 50 times more potent. You want the cure for white obsolescence, its Trump or H.
And then there’s Trump, our short-fingered vulgarian, the white knight of the disrupted and the departed and inciter of mob frenzy: He is the great white pitchman of the hopeless, promising greatness again for America and wealth for us all. It’s political crack, and Trump’s wildfire popularity speaks for the desperation of those on the shelf of white middle class life who have already broken loose are in the mood to claw the rest of the disadvantaged into the drink. The extreme is where the social media cascade is most effective, whether its radicalizing some dork to go shoot up a mall in the name of the Islamic Caliphate or hiss cunt and spic and sand nigger at the disrupters of white hegemony. If you think presidential politics has taken on the obscene swagger of a booty rap song, welcome to digitally disrupted politics.
Here in Florida, chunks are everywhere, and it’s getting hard not to see them breaking loose every day. Chronic flooding from sea level rise not only affect Miami but is spreading up both coasts. Coastal environments are further collapsing due to pollution, poor drainage and relentless El Nino rains. The North Indian River Lagoon is right now in the middle of devastating fish kill, with hundreds of thousands of dead fish lining the coast for miles. Lake Ockechoobee has been swollen with rain and is flushing agricultural waste from sugar farms throughout South Florida. Something is rotten in the Sunshine State.
In keeping with its Alfred Neumanesque visage of What, Me Worry? as the edifice falls, none of these chilling events are denting the Florida’s marketing one bit: Retirement communities are booming (for the third straight year, the Villages was the fastest growing metro area in the nation), and the Orlando the seventh-fasting growing economy in the nation. Low-paying service economy jobs fan out from retirement housing development like kudzu. Puerto Rico’s failing economy is driving hundreds of thousands to south central Florida. Now Rick Scott is trying to get Yale to relocate to the state from Connecticut, promising not to tax the institution’s investment fund. It’s like it’s 1955 and LeRoy Collins is laying out the state’s welcome mat, wishing those Groveland niggers would keep quiet.
In Mount Dora, the spike metaphor fits perfectly when you examine how much utilities relocations, road expansion and new development will explode on the city’s east side. On balance, growth over the next five years will be greater than the previous 50. Moving 441 in 1960 to make a long arc around what was then the city’s outer rim eventually created the defining center for the “new” Mount Dora, half of which hasn’t even been built yet. Crazy, right? Now consider that the city is riding that wave without captain, co-captain or experienced legal first mate, just a riled-up council who may be largely gone within two years. No one at the wheel and it’s spinning crazily and the draw of the wave is going up up up up up.
Join the club, Mount Dora. Grab on to something, because the future is coming that fast.
IV.
The futurist Marshall McLuhan loved Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “A Descent into The Maelstrom.” In it he saw perfect instruction in how to survive periods of violent upheaval. As the tale goes, a couple of brothers spend too much time out fishing on the dangerous waters near Lofoten in Norway and end up in the dreaded Maelstrom, a massive tidal whirlpool. Once their boat is caught, there is no way out; slowly it descends the swirling, mile-round vortex, down toward the doom which has claimed hundreds of ships and sailors over the centuries. One brother clutches in terror to the bow of the ship; the other realizes that it is the nature of the vortex to pull things like ships down, and so he looks about for items in the drift which are not being carried down. He espies a barrel that keeps going round at the same level, and leaves the ship for it. His brother won’t let go and is hauled down to doom. Eventually the bore ceases and the man is rescued from the floating barrel. McLuhan commented in “Man and Media,”
Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion or consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.
The technological changes McLuhan spotted were a-swirl and a-mounting all the way back in 1950, when he wrote his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man — advertising, radio, the press. All of have largely gone down the Internet maelstrom, but the keys for survival — if there are any — involve getting and keeping out of the line of fire.
The first resistance then must be to our addiction to digital media before it replaces our minds. If large chunks of the Antarctic shelf are falling off due to global warming, equal-sized chunks of human consciousness are being lost due to the disruption of all things by digital media. And we can’t think our way out of the digital maelstrom with digital minds; it’s like an alcoholic trying to drink his way out of the bottle. Lynch writes in The Internet of Us,
In real life, all the ways we have of knowing are important. But without understanding, something deeper is missing. And our digital form of life, while giving us more facts, is not particularly good at giving us more understanding. Most of us sense this. That is one reason we try to limit our children’s screen time and encourage them to play outside. Interaction with the world brings with it an understanding of how and why things happen physically that no online experience can give. And it is shy so many of us who use Facebook are troubled by its siren song: it is a simulacrum of intimacy, a simulacrum of mutual understanding, not the real thing. The pattern of what people like or don’t tells us something about them — more in fact, than they may wish. But it doesn’t tell us why they like what they like. It doesn’t allow us to understand them. Facebook knows, but doesn’t understand. (16)
Going outside into a 360-degree, 3-dimensional world opens up the sensatory floodgates to all the information you got a thin digital copy of online: how can understanding not be more complex and deep offline? Chat is words on a screen — helpful enough — but conversation is all the visual cues of meaning which heart-knowledge is rooted in. Avatars are masks of the finite in a simulated community of one.
Once you challenge the Matrix, you begin to see the tyranny of it. It seems like clawing out of a Cling-Wrapped world, but really what you’re doing is finding a way out of the ruts in your own brain. Google-knowledge as thought is your brain on big data — infinitely outsourced, hived, malleable and easy—well on the way to default mode — but in one specific way of thinking only. Try reading for comprehension online; the medium is all flow, no structure, and designed to give you a hundred digressions from what you were working on. It assumes you are looking for more inputs rather than solidifying a thought. Chances are you’re somewhere way far away by the time I finish this sentience. The Web has given me obscene permission to go on and on and one — infinite newshole — while at the same time it’s given you the ultimate permission to ditch the conversation after a few words and wander off.
Given that permission, one of the great ironies of our time is that what was heralded as the final frontier of intellectual freedom, the Internet has instead become that place where the last traces of independent thought wander off.
And yet, that’s par just for the course for technology: The Internet is just the latest in a long chain of innovations which woke us from the three-million-year dreamtime around 10,000 BCE, sending our gods to Tartarus and establishing human rule on Olympus where our brand champions — Apollo and Athena and Mars et al — have been busy hammering out the tools of mastery, each next one shinier and sexier than the last.
That worked out well enough when was swords and shields, but h-bombs, iPhones and Lipidor have made the human race too powerful. Technology is worst at questioning its motives and ends, and when those aren’t the mayhem can look like a scene from Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, enthralled brooms busily sweeping at rising tides of seltzer pink and emerald sea-water.
Mastery understands that power without wisdom is tyranny, and wise use of technology when the tools have become bigger and smarter than human brains is something that keeps the likes of Eton Musk and Stephen Hawking up at night. (Just this past week, a just-released Microsoft artificial intelligent chat bot named Tay transformed within hours to a Twitter-based stream of sexist, racist, Holocaust-denying rants.)
Big data is becoming the foundation of our new economy, bringing both vast predictive power (and transforming how our buying decisions will be influenced) as well as unassailable security and privacy issues. (Consider the 2014 data breech at eBay that absconded with the birth dates, home and email addresses of 145 million individuals.) Big Brother was once the casual and respectful business interests who allow us to do so much traffic on the Web for free, but now he is watching us from both Washington and North Korea and an ISIL stronghold in Syria. Factor in that neuromedia — data that streams directly into our brains through implants — is presently on the Google drawing boards, you can see that the badboy Maelstrom has graduated from consequence to rule of this dizzy upward wave.
V.
So what is a citizen journalist supposed to be doing when such a wave is streaming straight up ahead and out of sight? What am I going to tell my neighbors, my wife, the next generation to take up residence here — and their kids?
Mount Dora hasn’t had a newspaper for ten years. The Mount Dora Topic would be celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year. The Internet disrupted local news operations like the Topic, and hasn’t done much to replace it. Local news is way down your Facebook feed, I think, or maybe is an email with links. Chances are you’ll miss it, scan through it fast if you do catch it and quit reading if it doesn’t somehow nail your attention as it flitters by.
The job of the digital journalist is to take all that conspires to work against the mission of reporting the news and make of it a new target. Pattern recognition, right? To make the news look enough like what is still rising with the tide and worthy of attention. To offer tools and give hope.
But this doesn’t mean romancing the aggressor. Facebook conspires against news; so does the online mind. Working in digital journalism means using a whole lot of tools designed to keep attentions wandering and somehow keeping them trained on attention and engagement, be it comments or community-suggested content or events.
- Media must be a lot more useful to its community. We need to be reader-first rather than digital-first.
- We can’t let print go. Somehow, there needs to be another medium of exchange which reaches into the wider community.
- We should be teachers of good digital community so our children can become good digital citizens.
- We should be working to preserve our community history wherever it’s now found — in print, microfilm or online.
- Local media needs to show its readers how to reach out — and then give equal opportunity for the community to reach back.
If these things can be accomplished — big If, folks — then a citizen’s journalism might survive with this town.
* * *
In their 2010 book Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload, journalists Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel suggest that local media provide a rich alternative to Google-knowledge, because whatever it advocates is a response to the community’s need to understand. It is through providing that alternative that local news can find a way out of its own maelstrom:
If the fatal mistake that buggy companies and railway companies made was not understanding that they were in the transportation business, what is the analogy for news organizations?
Strip away platform. Strip away technique. Strip away culture. What function does a newsroom serve in its community? What is its essential purpose, apart from generating revenue?
Telling stories is not the answer. Neither is delivering the news, or even monitoring government. All those have been part of it historically. But we think the essential function is something broader and more conceptual, and the future of journalism depends in part on embracing this broader notion.
A news gathering organization is a place that accumulates and synthesizes knowledge about a community, either a geopolitical community or a community of subjects of interests, and then makes that knowledge available and interactive in a variety of ways. (190)
The good news is that we have the chance to use the tools available to see and understand and act for the future.
And when it gets too much, we can go outside and breathe and remember that our creaturely bodies are rooted and sustained in a big green world.
We’re in this together.
And the alternative? It may be more reasonable to conclude that this thing was bought and sold long ago. That America was lost with Reagan and Devo’s “Whip It.” When Mount Dora painted itself pink and got its exit off the Honky Tonk Freeway.
Then all that’s left to write about is the wonder of the cascade, all foam and falling down.
And about those chunks? Hide your eyes, baby.
— David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
