I think I’ve seen one of the top ten stupidest headlines ever created (although I probably should reserve judgment, no doubt humans have not yet reached the zenith of stupidity). It is authored by someone named Charles Murray and in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The headline that caught my eye:…
Imagine that you’ve been given a huge box, hundreds of yards on each side, filled with hundreds of millions of parts. Imagine that you been told that it is your job to assemble all of those parts into a single functioning machine.
To your dismay, though, you can’t find any assembly manual. Imagine your frustration! It’s hard enough to assemble much simpler household products without their manuals. Without instructions, then, how can you possibly assemble hundreds of millions of parts into a functional whole?
Just as there are hundreds of millions of parts in this hypothetical machine, there are hundreds of millions of flesh and blood Americans. Together, we constitute a complex adaptive system of an unimaginably huge number of permutations of interactive possibility.
A vigorous media is the instruction manual for our democracy. It tells us how we fit together by telling us important things about each other. A healthy media doesn’t merely tell us information. To accomplish this, it must also listen to the stories that matter to each of us. A healthy media is necessarily interactive.
The decision to have vigorous media is therefore an affirmation that each person has a significant story to tell. A free and vigorous media allows the people to become self-assembling parts of a Democratic whole. When we are well-informed, we know the real-life possibilities for interacting with each other.
To function smoothly and efficiently as a democracy, we often need to work closely together, in a coordinated …
This post is one of a continuing series of summaries I am creating regarding the sessions I attended of the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tennessee. Much more information about the conference, including audio of all of the sessions (and video of many) can be found at Free Press.
The academics that spoke at this particular session (“Media Scholars’ Policy Research Review”) were proof that academics (the people and their topics) can be exciting.
Mary Kaplan is the associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, as well as the founder and director of the Norman Lear Center. Kaplan has focused his research on the content and regulation of local television news.
The Lear Center studies “entertainment.” Broadly defined, this is the “attention economy” which is no longer a separate economy from anything else. Entertainment has expanded like an empire to consume all other activities. Media and journalism are mere branches of entertainment.
Kaplan reports on research establishing that local TV news is, by far, the most important source of news and information for Americans. Almost unbelievably, 65% of Americans say that local television news is their number one source of information.
I write “unbelievably,” based on the widespread lack of serious news content. The fluff of local newscasts drives me to distraction. See an earlier post on local TV news at this site. Kaplan is troubled that most of the content of local news is “soft.” News directors of TV stations have repeatedly told …
As regular readers know, I take an interest not only in science, but in the evolution of science. Back before Newton proposed the bold theory that the force holding us to the ground was the same thing that guided the heavenly bodies, everyone knew that the grave matter of original…
Dangerous idea, that.
If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?
The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.
Pity the world doesn’t work that way.
The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.
The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.
It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.
If only.
It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.
The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …