Great Blog
The Future of News, by Steve Boriss, associate director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology at Washington University in St. Louis. Don’t be frightened by his wonkish title, media watcher Boriss is serious and thoughtful, but delightfully liberated from conventional prejudices. Incisive observations and commentary on the media, yesterday, today and tomorrow. He’s on a mission. Here’s a couple of good recent ones from the site. Here’s one from Pajamas in praise of yellow journalism. This guy is speaking my language. Only without the cheap puns, T&A links, etc. Here’s another good one:
It has taken technology 500 years to make news as good as it had been before the printing press was invented. Back then, when news was spread by word-of-mouth, we felt a personal bond with our news sources.
… in the past century, we allowed technology to turn our all-too-human news sources into unlikable know-it-alls.
Ha! Hey, wait a minute, I resemble that remark. Damn, that guy’s brutal.
Welcome, Boggdwellers! Always so wonderful to see you. I noticed your guy’s being civil today, there’s a surprise. Not like this guy … now there’s an academic who could learn something about communications from Boriss, among other things. Just curious, are your kind allowed to look at cheesecake? I think this makes Bundchen PC. You’ll also like this: Pro-Israel UN-basher gets arrested. Some bad news, however. It’s good news from Iraq. And from Congress.
Topics: media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:34 am Comments (6) on Tuesday, November 6, 2007
6 Responses to “Great Blog”
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November 6th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
… in the past century, we allowed technology to turn our all-too-human news sources into unlikable know-it-alls.
Except that, now, technology has reversed this process and allowed us to reach out and touch each other as never before.
November 6th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
From his mission statement: “Will modern journalism’s principles of objectivity, truth, verification, the public’s right-to-know, and disdain for the sensational be relevant, or will news become more similar to other consumer products, with news providers scrambling to meet their customers’ needs?”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a consumer of the news, I need for journalism to adhere to the principles of objectivity, truth, verification, etc. The problem is that they do not seem to understand how to define these principles. It is regularly posited that objectivity is impossible. They seem to think that one must have absolutely no opinion whatsoever about the subject at hand, or objectivity is out the window. All objectivity means is adherence to reality. And before some Kantian shows up to tell me that everybody has a different reality, let me just say that while people may have different perceptions and perspectives of reality, it is all one reality. If you are honest, you take these things into consideration. I will also say that while these perceptions and perspectives may differ, the infamous “two sides to every story” does not mean that both are equally valid. This particular canard comes from the idea that whatever one feels is true because one feels it. But emotions are not elements of cognition, and say nothing about the truth of the matter. It is critical thought that is lacking, and an ability to discriminate between what are the essentials of a particular story, and what are not.
I am not averse to personal opinion, when it is given as an argument to think about, not as gospel truth one is to believe on pain of being called a knuckle-dragging ignoramus. A little respect for the minds of others would go a long way.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:19 am
In a cohesive culture objectivity is a consensus view that allows everyone to start their view of events from a mutually agreed on base of standards. e.g. Child rape is commonly held to be a crime classified as heinous. Objectivity in this case would not be reported as will he be punished, but that he will be punished, but in what way. The phony objectivity that we see today starts from a rejection of cultural norms and then posits that anything that happens is normal. A facade built around a maelstrom.
My two cents.
November 7th, 2007 at 7:18 am
MikeH, you have given a perfect example of Kantian objectivity. The only difference between what I said and what you said is that you took it to its conclusion that reality is the collective mind of a culture. For Kant, reality is made up of the collection of minds, which he dubs Reason, with a capital R so we understand that Reason is a sort of demigod ruling the thoughts of men. Note he says that men do not use their reason to understand a reality independent of man’s mind, but that Reason supplies the reality (the phenomenal world). When he made this switch, making the “how” we know, the “what” we know, he laid the epistemological foundation for everything you see happening today–from totalitarianism in all its guises, to reporters who cannot tell a fact from an opinion on principle.
If there is no objective reality independent of man’s mind, then how do you know what you claim to know? By the results of a poll? How can you say whether anyone is right or wrong? Based on what? Your opinion? What is your opinion based on? Your upbringing? Where you grew up? Your culture? Your emotional responses? Or by observing reality and applying the principles of science to those observations to come to an understanding of the world around us? Aristotle, Galileo and Newton (to name three) helped to initiate the Enlightenment, modern science and the Industrial Revolution by observing, and then applying reason to the observed. We went to the moon, not on the wishes of the engineers who built the space ships, but on their reason. Their reason wasn’t applied to the emotional whims or fancies of the collective mind of all Americans, but on reason applied as ruthlessly to the facts of objective reality as each individual could attain.
I’m not going to go further with this, because I don’t want to bore everyone. These are esoteric philosophic questions, the answers to which most people simply take in without understanding their source or their consequences. But these ideas are fundamental to how we think about everything and getting them wrong, as man has done throughout his history, is the greatest source of his enslavement and the man-made destruction around him.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:08 am
[...] Hey, Jules Crittenden! I love you, man. I read you every day. Thanks for linking to Boriss’s piece. But I’m feeling kind of left out over here at Infotainment Rules. I skewer the pompous, too. [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Well said, salty!