[Imc-sc] Preparing for the Coming Era of Participatory News

[radtimes]

Preparing for the Coming Era of Participatory News

<http://www.ojr.org/ojr/future/1017170352.php>

The Internet means now everyone is a journalist - or can be.

Dale Peskin
2002-03-26

Forty years ago Marshall McLuhan observed that we look at the future 
through a rear-view mirror. He foresaw a time when our small planet would 
become a connected, ever-changing global village that would immediately and 
inextricably be altered by the way it is observed and reported.
McLuhan warned that few would notice. We would be changing and moving too 
fast, he predicted. Our vision for the future would be left to a backward 
glance through a small window of a moving vehicle.
Last year, I was hired at New Directions for News to look down the road ahead.
My job is to explore changes, to extend vision. For three decades, I looked 
at change from the driver's seat of a speeding vehicle. Like most in the 
news industry, I saw it through a lens of convention, ritual, and 
self-interest.
The view changes when you leave speeding vehicles and avert your eyes from 
backward glances. Outside the newsrooms and the boardrooms of our news 
companies, the road ahead looks bumpy:
1.	Communication is king, not content.
2.	News is a distant fourth - behind entertainment, communication and 
transactions - on consumer's hierarchy of desires.
3.	News evolves into collaborative, a participatory activity. Everyone is a 
journalist, or can be. Peer-to-peer news will eclipse business-to-consumer 
news.
4.	The expected synergies and efficiencies associated with consolidation, 
centralization, and clustering prove to be overrated.
5.	Convergence happens to consumers, not to newsrooms.
6.	Every company becomes a media company. They succeed or fail on the basis 
of their stories.
7.	Services replace products as the foundation of local, regional and 
global economies.
8.	The decline in the traditional markets for news accelerates. As media 
become ubiquitous and pervasive, fragmentation of markets also accelerates.
9.	A new group of consumers - the Millennials - emerges. They have no 
loyalty to news organizations. They don't read newspapers. Their habits and 
behaviors have no context in traditional news products. By sheer numbers, 
they have the power to transform consumer markets.
10.	The news industry fails to innovate, to change, and to create catalysts 
for growth.

Will newspapers and the networks survive? Will online news be profitable? 
Will convergence work? How will news inform society in the future? What 
economic models will support it?
The job of forecaster, like the job of the journalist, is to explore and to 
explain. The challenges of both lead to explorations and explanations about 
the forces of change.  Today, those forces unfold at the speed of a 
click.  They create new media, new freedoms, and new stories. We tend to 
overlook their role in the society we have created and the future we are 
inventing.
Ours is a future of stories 
 of stories and clicks. I offer three for the 
road traveled, and for the road ahead.
The Acoustic Audience
Click to 20th Century. Hans Solo is at the controls of the Millennium 
Falcon, racing through the void. There are no recognizable planets or 
stars, just pinpoints of light rushing toward the spaceship. Solo puts the 
spaceship into light speed. The pinpoints stand still, then blur. Solo and 
his spaceship become simultaneous and everywhere at once.
Marshall McLuhan arrives. He uses the scene to describe the properties of 
acoustic space. He acknowledges that Hollywood's special effects 
anticipated his description. Life imitates media.
Media surrounds us, and we, in turn, surround media. The best interface of 
modern times, the loudspeaker, surrounds us with sound.  Now portable, 
plugged into our ears, we surround ourselves as we go. Media and its news 
begin to envelop us the same way.
McLuhan takes us to an acoustic portal, New York City's Times Square. From 
glass-enclosed studios at street level, reporters and "the talent" report 
on news, business, sports and popular culture. As part of the stories, New 
York's eclectic swirl of residents, workers and tourists move past the 
studios as part of the set. Sometimes the set moves outside for greater 
intimacy, further blurring the distance between newsmakers and news 
consumers. Sometimes the audience moves inside to interact with what's 
occurring in the studio.  Meantime, the camera captures it all. Images of 
the scenes are projected in real-time on multi-story screens above the 
studio amid a dizzying array of constantly changing news-tickers, 
promotions and commercials.
Just off the square, a half-block down 43rd Street, a clock outside a stone 
fortress marks another portal. It is The New York Times Building, the 
bastion of straight-ahead, visual space.
Enter media ecologist Todd Gitlin. "Never have so many communicated so 
much, on so many screens, through so many channels, absorbing so many hours 
of irreplaceable human attention, about communications," says Gitlin, a 
professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. He 
observes that the information age was suppose to bring us together, but in 
the end it makes us numb, hampers our freedoms, and erodes our democracy.
McLuhan cringes. Media, like electricity, was feared and misused before it 
was understood and harnessed. He reads a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 
The House of Seven Gables, written in 1851: "It is a fact 
 that, by means 
of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating
thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe 
is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or shall we say it is 
itself a thought, nothing but a thought, and no longer the substance which 
we deemed it."
Click to screens. Screens in lobbies and elevators. Screens in the front of 
stores and the back of bathroom stalls. Screens in the concourses of 
shopping malls and airports. Screens at restaurants and taverns, situated 
to catch glances in any direction. Screens at stadiums and arenas. Screens 
on automobile dashboards and airplane consoles. Screens along 
highways.  Screens in media rooms, in the doors of refrigerators, and in 
mirrors of medicine cabinets.  News and information spew from every one.
How long will it take to understand the new electricity? McLuhan asks.  How 
far will we travel before we become a society immersed in access and 
pervasive media?
                             Not long and not far
Meet the Millennials, the 71 million children of Baby Boomers who are 
coming of age. They download music into mobile players. The expression "You 
sound like a broken record" means nothing to them.  On their cell phones, 
they never hear a busy signal or fail to get an answer. Pearl Harbor and 
Vietnam are the stuff of movies;
September 11 is a defining event. MTV informs them the way the Big Three 
Networks informed their parents. They don't read newspapers.  Computer use 
and Internet connectivity are mainstream activities.
They consider the special effects in the vintage film Star Wars bogus.
The Millennials are acoustic. They respond to graphics, sound, action, 
interaction, and immersive activities. Through their experiences, they 
begin to shape the future of news on a small, inter-connected planet.
William Gibson and Carson Daly arrive to introduce the generation.  "The 
future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" says Gibson, the 
science-fiction writer who coined the word "cyberspace." Teenagers gather 
around the portal at Times Square. Surrounded by screens and loudspeakers, 
Daly asks for requests.
If you don't know who he is, you're already out of touch. And you won't get 
your request.
                             The dangerous idea
Click to the Sixth Century BC. Hippasus of Metapontum stands on a boat in 
the Aegean, pondering his fate. Pythagoras himself sentences him to death 
for revealing a secret that undermined the Greek way of thinking.
Pythagoras is noted throughout the world for his famed theorem: the square 
of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of 
the other two sides. The theorem makes the universe understandable. Its 
ratios and proportions are keys to explaining mathematics, science, music, 
nature, harmony and beauty in a civilized society.
The problem is that Pythagoras had it wrong. To the Greeks the number zero 
does not exist. A ratio with zero in it defies nature, and thus the logic 
of the universe. But the math is incontrovertible. The Pythagoreans figure 
it out, responding by forming a brotherhood to deny the existence of zero, 
to preserve the mathematical laws that make them leaders in civilized 
society, and to protect their charismatic leader.
Hippos, a mathematician and member of the brotherhood, spills the secret 
about irrational numbers and an irrational universe. The Pythagoreans take 
him to sea, tossing him overboard for exposing a self-serving theory with 
an unpopular truth. *
Click to present day. Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. 
and former Post associate editor Robert Kaiser arrive to deliver "the news 
about the news." The Washington Post editors make an old argument for a new 
time: news is sinking to another new low. Downie and Kaiser blame 
consolidation, convergence, and proliferation of media for undermining good 
journalism and failing to inform society. They acknowledge that they come 
to their perspective from "the privileged perch" of The Washington Post. 
The view from the privileged perch is predictably Pythagorean.
As an interconnected society moves toward participating in the news, the 
Brotherhood of News seeks to protect its values and exert its control. Just 
as zero changed the equation shaping humanity's vision
of the universe, accessible media changes the equation that shapes news and 
informs society. Everyone is a journalist in the age of access. But for 
most news organizations, collaboration with their audience is an irrational 
concept, a dangerous idea.
Click back to Pythagoras. The story unfolds like a video game. A 
health-conscious leader who believes indigestion causes all disease, 
Pythagoras especially fears beans because they cause flatulence in past, 
present and future lives. His arrogance grows, his views become extreme, 
and soon his secret society crumbles.  Enemies set out to kill him. A mob 
sets his house on fire. Members of the brotherhood are 
slaughtered.  Pythagoras flees, but he stops at a bean field, declaring 
that he'd rather be killed than cross the field. His pursuers oblige. They 
cut his throat.
Arrogance and eternal flatulence. Pythagoras dies for behaviors and beliefs 
that put him out of touch with the rest of the world.
                             Emergence: The future in a nutshell
Click to the moment. I realize, too late, that we should not write essays 
on the future of news for the Online Journalism Review. We should create 
journeys and experiences.
You and I would travel to a future about stories. In a time when 
information and intelligence is the domain of computers, we would come to a 
place that values the one human quality that can't be automated - emotion. 
We would pause to experience stories that shape the human experience. We 
would linger in a society where people thrive on stories and myths, where 
commerce succeeds or fails on its ability to create products and services 
that evoke emotion, where everything is held together with stories.
Storytellers - specialists in the art of conveying human emotions rule this 
future. And in this future, everyone is a storyteller. Everyone creates the 
collective experience. Everyone creates the collective intelligence.
We would travel backward and forward in a loop. Time is never linear. 
Neither are its stories. They are organic, always growing and changing. 
They have no beginning, middle or end.
How to travel?  The Web. From there we go where imagination leads.  On the 
Web, imagination takes an interconnected society on a journey of timeless 
discovery through words, images and interaction.  Instead of writing essays 
we would build a site. We would create experiences.  We would make stories.
Our stories will take us beyond convergence to emergence. There, news 
becomes the product of a universally distributed intelligence that develops 
from an interconnected society enabled by interactive media.  It occurs in 
real time, self-regulating, constantly enhanced.  The connections enabled 
by media lead to mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals, rather 
than a cult of communities and institutions.
The calculus for the fundamental unity of knowledge emerges. The guiding 
tenets: No one knows everything. Everyone knows something. All knowledge 
resides in humanity.
"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space," 
writes Shakespeare, the best of storytellers.
We could capture the future in a nutshell. The future is creating an 
expansive, new universe for news. It is changing the way news happens, to 
whom it happens, and how it happens. To find its place in the future, news 
organizations must first recognize that everyone seeks an experience they 
can become a part of. News comes from all directions, as in a dream. 
Today's news organizations seem lost in the dream, strangely asleep.
I hope for an awakening. Listen again to Shakespeare: "For in that sleep, 
what dreams may come."
-------------
* The story of Hippasus and Pythagoras is abased on Zero, The Biography of 
a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife.