Alternative Editorial: A New Media Sensibility
Sometimes, you have to look away. Especially when you read that the pandemic created a new billionaire every 30 hours, on the backs of billions of people enslaved by the system these elites designed, pushed into poverty by their greed.
Or when your own government holds back the obvious help it could offer the poorest. That is, right up until the moment comes when that same help can be used to distract attention from their criminal behaviour.
Reading about the Pareto principle – the model illustrating how the rich get richer, the poor get poorer – only confirms the powerlessness of our anger and frustration. Fairness becomes irrelevant in the face of compound interest—the increasing returns that go to what Thomas Piketty called the “asset classes”. Why waste your energy getting in the path of that train?
But other times we cannot not look away, or step sideways to evade, our social pathologies. For example, when children are murdered by children in an entirely preventable tragedy. Salvador Ramos, a disturbed adolescent, was able to walk into a gun store in Uvalde, Texas, and buy two rifles with no check on his age, his history of crime or his state of mental health.
After murdering his grandmother, he went to Robb Elementary School and murdered 19 children between seven and ten, as well as two teachers who used their bodies as shields, hoping to protect them.
It’s the 27th school shooting in the US this year—and it’s still only May. Firearms are now the number one cause of death for young people across America. This phenomenon is particular to the US because the government (despite 90% of people calling for background checks) has not been able to pass the necessary laws to prevent children and youth buying assault weapons.
Other countries have and the results have been clear. After the Dunblane massacre in Scotland 26 years ago, where 16 children were murdered, gun legislation was passed making it very difficult to purchase firearms: there has been no school shooting in the UK since. In 1996, after 35 killed children were gunned down in Port Arthur, Australia, legislation was passed, and it’s never happened again. Paying attention to clear victories for popular demand and common sense helps people to experience their agency in the public sphere.
Yet rarely do we get to choose the kind of solutions-oriented news we want to read in our newspapers. While we are bombarded with headlines about social injustice, violence, environmental collapse, there are few media outlets where you can read about an effective response we can be part of. When we are trying to plan for our futures in the face of chaotic events – VUCA, facing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity – we are generally encouraged by the media to transfer our natural agency to those who led us into trouble in the first place.
Instead of moving us towards deliberation and decision making, we are exhorted to buy stuff we don’t need in order to save an economy that remainders us. Imagine if we each had a carbon budget, connecting our own decisions around energy, travel and food directly to outcomes for our community and the planet. Or a daily opportunity to vote for or against rules and regulations that directly impact upon our lives.
Civic Square offering neighbourhood opportunities to learn together
Or maybe complex problems could be explained with several levels of involvement available. From ways to think about the issues at one end. Then all the way through to how you can be part of a team co-creating policy suggestions at the other.
But not all the information we might seek would be practical or solutions-oriented. A large part of a better media system would be actively developing a new sensibility, a different way of being in the world. This might be pursued through the design of its output: instead of short sharp messaging, crowding digital columns of news items, it might experiment with layouts that invite the reader to linger more. Have a greater flow of images and text interspersed with poetry, for example. If there was a stronger ethos of connecting the personal with the communal and the political, there might be a greater use of colour to prompt shifting emphases.
Similarly, in this era of wider psychological literacy, there could be opportunities built into our media to follow up on our emotional responses to news. Not just the current “if this news affects you, click on this link”. (Although that may well be a signpost to the future of developing self-awareness). But maybe questions could be embedded in the text that could take the reader deeper into meaning-making, or put them on a path to creating value of some kind.
In this way, readers might think of themselves as having more of a relationship with the news, rather than being simple consumers. Or worse, being victims of the news - as might be the case when we are simply triggered by fearful headlines to go searching for comfort and security in food, drink or authority.
A conscious, even passionate relationship with the news would look more like going actively towards our news sources, having put aside some time to do so. We might even decide to do that along with others, anticipating good discussion and maybe some planning to come out of it. Maybe borrowing from Scandinavian study circle traditions. A good news session might be the most creative event of the day – from which you might emerge enlivened, enriched and resourced.
Another step up from that would be to think about a media system that offers you partnership in some way. By becoming a member you can drop into a communications hub that invites your active participation as a creator of a global commons, giving you access to tools, methods, teams, blueprints and so on.
Some lively and enterprising freelancers would say this is already how they use their media: but what if we all had that opportunity? Of course, not everyone has the mind-set of working autonomously, especially if that means precariously too. However, everyone can benefit from engaging in the kinds of networks that help them feel more supported and acknowledged in the world outside their own home. For that reason, local news should always be part of a bigger media ecosystem.
So in this better media, we’d lose the gossip or fearmongering that used to be the staple of the local rag. What we’d have instead is cosmolocal news—helping people living in a town or city join up the dots between what’s happening on their doorstep with the bigger picture of what’s happening in the wider world. That joining could take the form of gatherings, events and festivals – occasions where innovation can be shared. Or it could come in the form of a food project where local growers can benefit from breakthroughs in biodiversity experiments, instigated on the other side of the world.
Ultimately, news is a communications opportunity out of which relationship and agency are generated. And communications projects themselves are, when holistically designed, the sparks of energy between multiple parties that give birth to new worlds.