New Media Downside
I usually look at the glass half full, but something about new media’s potential effect on American society leaves me feeling more empty.
I find myself seeking out the NBC network news at 7 with Brian Williams, or the BBC or national public television …looking for that feeling of belonging that I had watching Walter Cronkite when I was a kid. He was speaking to all of us as a united nation with common interests and desires for our common good. While I love the creativity that new media unleashes, and the opportunity it gives for expression of all kinds from anyone, anywhere, I hope that some avenues of professional journalistic reporting remain to bring us together for messages we may not want to hear but need to hear. Where will the objective reporting coming from?
Paul Saffo said it best in a recent Economist.com article…. a futurologist described as “one of the world’s most enthusiastic technophiles,” said that on the downside, “Each of us can create our own personal-media walled garden that surrounds us with comforting, confirming information and utterly shuts out anything that conflicts with our world view,” he says. “This is social dynamite” and could lead to “the erosion of the intellectual commons holding society together…We risk huddling into tribes defined by shared prejudices.”
Aren’t we doing this already? What do you think?
Looking for News in All the Wrong Places
For two years now I have gone to bed at 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. expecting to find a summary of world news on cable TV networks, but I felt disappointed—in fact, starved for news. I’ll admit it, I am a news junky.
If you are reading this post, perhaps you did the same thing. But, we were looking for news in all the wrong places.
I was not satisfied to watch every network cover the same tasteless details over and over again …celebrities in and out of detox, missing people, talking heads or You Tube re-runs.. I never learned anything new.
I started going around complaining about it. People pointed to the Web but my only access was in the office and I had left there. Then, after a recent tour of CNN with my daughter, the guide said most of their viewers are getting their news from CNN’s web site, not from television broadcasts. It was an “aha” moment. I must turn to the Web if I want more than People magazine or tabloid type content. Here I am!
Can you recommend any good blogs for world news?