The Evaporation of Capital-🅹 Journalism

Our Human Instincts Have Caught Up With Us

While the old way would have depended on the ethics of capital-J Journalism to filter the noise and weed out the garbage, individuals are now empowered to self-organize and choose for themselves who the real hero of the people is and what information is valid. Unfortunately this change has occurred parallel to an evaporation of capital-J Journalism and has been replaced by the cancer of viral journalism that rewards the funniest/most interesting news instead what is appropriate and in the best interest of the American voter.

Last week I made a claim that journalism (or the lack thereof) is at the core of the problem causing the current circus that is our national politics. Shameless sensationalism, clickbait titles, and Buzzfeed style quizzes dominate those airwaves previously reserved for objective journalism.

But we did not get here overnight. Sensationalizing titles is as old as print media and any introduction to media course will teach that if you fail to grab attention in the first line, there’s no need to write the rest. Internet or not, attention-grabbing is at the very core of writing.

So what is it about the internet that seems to have changed the way we absorb information?

Nicholas Carr argues that it was only a matter of time before the wave of information technology caught up to our instinctual human biology.

The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible….Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby source of food. -Nicholas Carr in “The Shallows”

Thanks to our predisposition to distraction, we can keep up with hundreds of different things, even if we fail to ingest most of them. Push notifications, texts, emails, tweets, data alerts, news alerts; they all feed into a cacophony of white noise that we not only strive to manage but grow to enjoy.

If constant distraction was the original state of the human man, then reading was most certainly a disruption. Carr notes that the move from oral communication to writing drastically challenged our preconceptions of learning and concentration: “to read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object.” Reading is not a natural talent for man; in fact, teaching someone to read is incredibly difficult. Unlike language, which flows naturally, reading requires concentration, practice and repetition.

In a masterful irony the internet now preys upon that victory we had over our animal instincts: the ability to focus and concentrate.

So the internet is distracting and we crave distraction. How does that affect our news, or politics?

The problem with the internet has always been its multi-purpose nature. It can be a game system, a television, a word processor, a stockbroker, you name it. Every facet of the medium screams for your attention.

By combining many different kinds of information on a single screen, the multimedia Net further fragments content and disrupts our concentration. A single Web page may contain a few chunks of text, a video or audio stream, a set of navigational tools, various advertisements, and several small software applications, or “widgets,” running in their own windows. -Nicholas Carr in “The Shallows”

In that mess, somewhere, journalists are tasked with the impossible duty of grabbing your attention, keeping it, and returning for more later. A problem this insurmountable has not challenged journalism since the advent of cartoons, crosswords, and sports in newspapers. At least back then, you couldn’t accidently play a video game or watch porn in a newspaper.

60 years ago, it was easy to get objective news. You turned on the one news channel that aired for one hour and, if you were more interested, you picked up a daily newspaper. And if you were super wonky, you subscribed to a publication. Today, news channels mine content to fill the 24-hour window and sometimes good, hard-hitting news about Syria loses to Buzzy the dog shooting hoops on Fox and Friends.

Journalism has no place competing against cats who are scared of cucumbers. But it still has to. As we divide our attention to a greater array of media (videos, GIFs, games, etc) so must the reporters follow in a hope to deliver their message.

Journalism is not really at fault here.

I have concluded before that entertainment journalism is the by-product of media business models seeking to generate revenue through advertising and clicks. But it is more than that. It reflects an intellectual culling in society.

In a world where journalists are competing against cat memes, those cats intrinsically hold the same social value as your “news.” That means that the proliferation of other distractions is actually more heinous than the competition itself. On a individual level, people are actively choosing the cat memes because they value their time spent on viewing them, and not the news product.

This is the grotesque evil that is shaping our shallow news cycle and shameless political process. The only message with the power to cut through the noise and garbage of puppies and tragedies is a comment like “Megyn Kelly has blood coming out of her whatever.” Only then do people turn their gaze to laugh, comment, hate or discern.

This is an irreversible path.

The only thing worse than trying to teach an old dog new tricks is trying to break a puppy’s bad habit. For those who are old enough to cringe at this new age of media, there are millions more outnumbering us who are growing up in this new media century and becoming adept at younger ages.

This should frighten us because Carr says there is a fundamental change occurring in our brains that will reverse a trend we spent a millennia learning, to focus and read, instead surrendering those talents to an automated gestalt of knowledge:

The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. And, thanks once again to the plasticity of our neuronal pathways, the more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted — to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering. Our growing dependence on the Web’s information stores may in fact be the product of a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying loop. As our use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the Net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory, even if it makes us shallower thinkers. -Nicholas Carr in “The Shallows”

The garbage flourishes because we consistently choose garbage.