Trump, Postman, Orwell and Huxley

In the introduction to Neil Postman’s classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the author draws several distinctions between the dystopia of George Orwell in “1984” and that of Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World.”

As Postman described it, Orwell’s vision was of an oppressive dictatorial mind control that “flipped” human values. Vis. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

Huxley, on the other hand, described a world in which we ourselves choose to escape through drug-induced fantasies. “…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”

On the status of truth, Postman wrote: “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

There’s more that Postman contrasted and it’s well worth reading, but at the end of his introduction, he concluded: “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Looking at the 2016 election and the on-going Trumpian transition to power, I conclude that both Huxley and Orwell were right…but there is much, much more going on.

Certainly Orwell’s fear of truth being concealed from us is true and has been throughout our history. But, likewise, as Huxley predicted, truth has become “drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

Indeed truth itself seems irrelevant, not because it is concealed, but because what passes as truth is fabricated and, even after being unmasked, still manages to retain its power.

So we have “fake news.” We are dizzily forced to tease reality from “reality.” Fact from fiction. If we have the time or inclination for it….

The consequences are clear and dangerous beyond the results of the election.

Yesterday’s news of the armed “self-investigator” set upon threatening a pizza parlor is a case in point. The pizza establishment had been falsely portrayed by trolls as being at the center of child sex ring operated by none other than Hillary Clinton. The gunman bought the lie.

Such rampant lies result from financial as well as political incentives.

Witness the entertainment business. Entertainment, much of it violent and outlandish, is richly rewarding. That has been true for decades, but, amplified by new technologies, it has escalated in brutality.

Society and civility are far the worse for it.

And so we have the president of CBS, Les Moonves, confessing during Trump’s profane, violence-prompting, news cycle-grabbing campaign. "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Solitary trolls have made small fortunes concocting “fake news” (ie. lies) to attract internet “clicks” and hence money on Facebook and other sites.

In such an amoral environment, lying overwhelms truth in the marketplace of “ideas.”

Just as “truth will set us free,” today’s rewards for lying have doomed us to enslavement.

So who was right? Huxley or Orwell?

While I wouldn’t wish our predicament upon Postman (who died in 2003), Orwell or Huxley, I yearn to put the question to them.

You are what your are fed...on the internet

Here's a righteous plea that must be heard and shared.

It seems we are being blinded to diversity by search engines and social media that skew and narrow our information and our on-line contacts.

Somehow we must take control.

How the Internet shapes decisions — a Quaker's perspective

Communicating via e-mail, texting and Facebook exchanges present a host of inherent problems. Unless you are a Writer (that’s with a capital “W”), such communication is often one-dimensional, lacking inflection, dramatic pauses, and texture.

If you agree those limitations pose problems, consider the loss Quakers experience as they try conducting business on the internet.

Traditionally Quakers rely heavily on silent "gathered" reflection to discern what to do. Yet silence “plays” about as well on the internet as it does on talk radio. Imagine Rush Limbaugh interrupting a debate (usually one-sided) with “Let’s pause a moment in silence to consider what the caller is saying.”

Quaker silence gets even more complicated because Friends seek to be “spirit-led” in the stillness of reflection and meditation. When was the last time you sought the spirit as you were e-mailing or texting? I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (it is more likely in the pauses of text exchanges than in, say, board room discussions or political debates), but it’s increasingly unlikely in this rapid-fire world.

For many Quakers, “spirit-led” means led by God. As a Friend recently commented, “When I look into the eyes of another, I am looking into the eyes of God.” The comment comes from the core Quaker belief that there is “that of God (or the Spirit, or both) in everyone.”

But if you aren’t looking at another person, you are unlikely to fully feel in the presence of their divinity. And if they are not looking into your eyes, your own divine presence may be forgotten. Our communication is shaped by that presence, or, alas, lack of it.

I raise these questions because of the tendency to conduct more and more business through the internet, conference calls, and, yes, video conferencing. I’m suggesting, as many others have, that every medium shapes its content — and hence the outcome of communication.

We all should ask ourselves how our decisions are altered by the medium we choose. And then we should consider what we might have decided had we met face-to-face — sharing in timely silence, allowing the “spirit” to lead us, seeing the divine presence in each other’s eyes.

Question: How might the decisions of our democratic institutions (Congress, the judicial system, elections) be different if they adopted these practices?

The Daily Us

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote a column ("The Daily Me") last Thursday advancing the thesis that as newspapers disappear, we will be on our own to pick and choose among news stories on the web.

He goes on to cite and agree with several studies that indicate we will choose to read only articles that re-enforce our biases. And we will ignore those that challenge our prejudices.

Kristof laments that the change will mean greater and greater polarization in a nation that can ill-afford it.

Perhaps, but for decades main-stream news media (newspapers, news magazines and TV) have provided us ideologically narrow choices. Rupert's choice and Gannett's and the New York Times', and CBS's and PBS's and The Oregonian's. With few exceptions (Bill Moyers, Ralph Nader and Ron Paul come to mind) mainstream American political discourse runs the gamut from "A" to "B."

By contrast, the Internet’s raging, howling cacophony give us a wild and refreshing range of political voices.

For 70 years, media myopia, extending in the narrow band from conservative Republican to liberal Democrat, has cramped our view of the world and our options.

The Internet has the potential to blow open awareness. Not just pushing out the boundaries on the political Left and Right, but lifting Up and pulling Down and exploring In and extending Out.

For example, I wonder whether the New Populism would have been amplified as it is being if it weren’t for the Internet and the millions of soapboxes that allowed the public to express its outrage over the AIG bonuses. Interestingly, that outrage has come from both Left and Right — and who knows where else.

Where’s the polarization? Where's "The Daily Me"?

What we have in the Internet is a Vox Populi. Not everyone may hear it, but it is always just a click away. And we can add our voices to it without paying a cent.

Before the Internet you had to go to some obscure storefront and purchase a screed to learn real alternatives. Now such opinion is free and on your desk top.

This is the stuff of pre-revolutionary pamphleteering that arose when owning a printing press was not limited to the wealthy. That widespread “power of the press” gave the American colonies the revolutionary “Common Sense” and hundreds of opinionated and, yes, biased pamphlets.

The Internet could fuel the equivalent to Thomas Paine’s persuasive prose, and before you know it we might be exposed to real choices. The economy might not be restored to its dependence on the old, destructive consumerist values; it might be fundamentally changed by a new set of values, as it desperately needs to be.

No, I don’t think the demise of tightly edited and narrowly circumscribed newspapers will give us “The Daily Me.”

I suspect it will give us “The Daily Us.” In fact it already has, and, unlike Kristof, I believe we are better for it.

Journalistic uncertainty

Today I taught my last class of the term, and, as is my custom, I invited questions on anything having to do with journalism.

One caught me flat-footed.

“If you were a student now, would you go into journalism?”

Dramatic pause.

I stared at the floor, looked up and smiled. “I’m not sure what it means to ‘go into journalism’ anymore. It’s not clear what journalism is becoming.”

Nor is it clear what it means to inform, or be informed, at least through journalism.

As a member of the pre-Internet generation, I have some idea of what it once meant. It seems like only yesterday that it had to do with newspapers and magazines and reading. I left it to editors to direct my attention to what was important, and each day I would sidle up to the journalism trough and partake of the news.

Today I don’t see all that much sidling or partaking. In an age of Twitter, blogs and Facebook, I’m not sure whether there is even a particular hunger for the news, at least the news as I understand it.

Gossip, trivia and opinion, yes; but not the news.

What constitutes journalism today? For a few more months, before newspapers vanish entirely, it may still be defined by “the Press” and its editors.

What then?

Like so many others, I believe a new, sustainable journalism model has yet to emerge, and it probably won’t until we are faced with the utter absence of newspapers. At that point, someone, some organization, some foundation or some cooperative will see the need for reliable sources of information on-line. The skills of newspaper reporting will be handed down to on-line journalists.

Alas, how they will be paid remains a mystery.

So, after a false start or two, I told my inquiring student that future journalists must be fully immersed in the changes taking place in communication. They must be flexible and prepared for the next Internet. If journalists are messengers and the medium is the message, then we must be masters of media and not let media master us.

Personally, I’ve had it easy because I am ending my journalism career at the end of a long, stable journalism era. The next generation of journalists will live through many eras thanks to changing technology. That’s a given. And each succeeding era will be shorter.

So the journalist embarking on a career today has a much more complex task than learning how to report and write. The job is more challenging, risky and exciting.

I saw the student who asked the question later in the day and asked him what he plans to do now that he has taken my journalism class.

“I’m thinking of teaching,” he said.

Pancake People

I just received the current issue of "The Sun" magazine, my hands-down favorite. — and it's not just because it carries no ads.

Alas, this issue's stories and articles aren't listed on-line yet so I can't link you to them.

Each month the magazine features a long interview. In this March issue it is with Nicholas Carr, who has given considerable thought to how computers and the Internet are changing how we think. He is the author of last August's "Atlantic" article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid."

Because I'm teaching an information gathering class, which relies heavily on students' finding information on the Internet, I found the following passage intriguing because my students, while quite capable of finding information, often are weak about analyzing it.

Q: You've quoted Richard Foreman, author of the play "The Gods are Pounding My Head," who says we are turning into "pancake people.

Carr: We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Foreman suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We'll become "pancake people," with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there's little need to contain information within our heads when it's so easy to find with a mouse click or two.

Leaving knowledge to the Internet

Marshall McLuhan, as I’ve noted before, wrote about how technology creates what he called “extensions of man.” The car is an extension of the foot, the telephone is an extension of the voice, the radio is an extension of the ear.

The internet is turning out to be an extension of the collective memory. That’s good and bad. We have come to rely on the Web as a ready source of information, but it has also become a reason not to retain knowledge personally. If some fact is a click or two away, why do we have to remember it?

I sense that I am experiencing this approach to knowledge with my students. They assimilate less and less because they know that it is readily available to them on-line. The result is that if you ask them a question and they don’t have ready access to their Internet “memory chips,” they draw a blank. Carried to its extreme, they are prevented from thinking on their own without the aid of their computers.

Mark Bauerlein, in his book “The Dumbest Generation, (How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future)” concludes, “The Dumbest Generation cares little for history books, civic principles, foreign affairs, comparative religions, and serious media and art, and it knows less.”

I disagree that the “Millennial Generation,” as it has been called, “cares little” about the above. They DO care, sometimes passionately, but because of their reliance on the Internet, they haven’t absorbed knowledge about their concerns, and so can’t and don’t converse readily about them.

In a sense they are literally “dumb.” They can’t speak for their lack of assimilated knowledge.

Will on-line newspapers adopt TV news values?

I took my “Mass Media and Society” class to The Oregonian and Willamette Week last night and came away more certain than ever that newspapers are in their death throes. Sure, we heard a lot of brave words about the future, but when the editors we talked to got down to specifics you could tell the ground was shaking beneath their feet — and that they had only vague ideas about what to do about it.

Convergence to screens like the ones we are staring at means that we’ll be seeing more and more video on “newspaper” web sites. In other words, newspapers will evolve into TV news programs. More and more news decisions will be driven by the demands of video’s moving, mesmerizing images. We will have less explanation and analysis and more touching, emotive “scenes” and “moments.”

The appeal will be to feelings, not thought. To haphazard, disconnected impressions, not linear, logical reasoning.

Technology is in the driver’s seat, and I for one don’t want to go where it is taking us.

The other concern at the newspapers is that the era of presses as money-making machines is over. No lucrative replacement is anywhere in sight. The Internet produces a small fraction of the revenue print did for papers. And so the forced transition of newspapers to the internet has meant smaller staffs, smaller papers, reporting on the cheap (read, crime news) and fluff.

There is no end in sight.

As I sat in its big news conference room, I imagined the hulking Oregonian building on SW Broadway housing neat insurance companies or law offices. Out with cluttered journalists’ cubicles.

As I see it, the best we can hope for are little networks and co-operatives of quasi-independent journalists who band together to market themselves and to build reputations for accuracy, fairness and compelling writing. But even they will have to compete on, and succumb to, screen images that purport to inform.

Old newspapers (and books and magazines) will be collected like typewriters, slide rules and “film” cameras.

The last print journalism to go will be the small, so-called “niche” publications. Many of them will be (and are) little more than advertising vehicles.

Then they too will give way to portable reading devices, whose photo reproductions will match, or exceed, those of the glossiest magazine. More than that, their photos will be (and are) moving pictures. Vanity Fair, Wired and The New Yorker can never match that capability within the confines of the printed page.

Finally, as the ways we are informed rapidly evolve, we, as sentient beings, will be changed. Note that we will not choose to change. The media environment will literally change us in how we relate to each other, how we make judgments, how our children learn and come of age, how we act and react, how we form our values, how we confront the future.

The speed of the change will be measured in a handful of years, perhaps even months. What took a century before, may take, at most, a decade. (Try to remember where we were in 1998.) In a single lifetime, a person will experience four or five generations remarkably dissimilar, almost alien one to another.

And above it all will be inexorable technological change whose far-flung, independent engineers and scientists will continue to be blind to, and seemingly unconcerned about, their inventions’ consequences to humanity and the planet.

Have we been run over by our search engines?

An article in the current issue of The Atlantic posits the idea that the internet is remolding the way we read — and ultimately the way we think. See “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicolas Carr.

The speculation shouldn’t surprise us. All major technological changes in the way we communicate reshape us in some way.

The inventions of the written word, the printing press, the telegraph, the television and now the internet all changed how we think.

The written word allowed knowledge to be recorded, eliminating the need for it to be memorized and passed on orally, and often inaccurately.

The printing press allowed that knowledge to be widely shared and led to the need for literacy and greater knowledge.

The telegraph freed communication for the constraints of the time needed to carry messages across physical space.

Television (and film and photographs) undermined rational, sequential thinking and tapped into non-verbal emotions and the subconscious. (Question: How do you "read" a picture?)

The internet has made vast (and overwhelming) amounts of information and knowledge instantly available.

They all to various degrees resulted in "media addiction."

McLuhan was right, of course: The medium is the message. As new media are invented, the very nature of messages change. And that change changes us as we struggle to understand.

So, is Google making us stupid?

The question begs for a “yes” or “no” answer. But the real answer is somewhere between — or above, or below — those extremes. The Internet is "remaking" us. It’s up to us to figure out how, what the changes mean to us as individuals, as a culture, as a species, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

The Tribune's tricky transition

Trick question time.

The Portland Tribune has:

A) gone from publishing twice a week to being a weekly (published on Thursdays)

B) become a daily

Tribune publisher and president Steve Clark wants us to believe both A) and B) are true.

Last Friday, Clark, top executive of Robert Pamplin Jr’s Portland Tribune and Community Newspapers, wrote a front-page article titled “Tribune announces changes.”

As it appeared on the page, readers might have mistaken it for a news story, but fully the first half turned out to be corporate puffery. Clark’s by-line came at the end. The piece should have been labeled “Publisher’s note,” “To our readers” or some such.

The news describing the “changes” mentioned in the headline appeared in the seventh paragraph after the jump inside the paper.

Moreover, Clark seemed on the defensive. Why else would he take bloggers to task for being prone to “vitriolic negativity” about the Tribune? Why would he feel compelled to anticipate the Willamette Week would “throw stones”?

That said, beyond my critique of the slant and tone of his announcement, Clark won’t find any “negativity” from me, vitriolic or otherwise.

(Disclosure time: You need to know that I am paid by Clark’s Community Newspapers for a column I write in the monthly Southwest Community Connection. I founded The Connection but sold it to Clark nine years ago.)

I agree with Clark that the Tribune has become a valued journalistic asset to Portland. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it has all the virtues he attributes to it in his announcement. It certainly has many of them.

Clark and Pamplin, like so many in the newspaper business, are migrating to the Web, by degrees. Friday’s announcement marks a major leg in the baggage-laden journey. Part of the baggage is the vocabulary of journalism. A key and burdensome word is “daily.” Is an on-line website that tracks breaking news really a “daily”?

It is, but only if readers turn to it each day, as nearly every literate adult once turned to daily newspapers.

Reading habits aren’t so easily transferable from print to computer. For one thing, the competition for attention on-line is intense and wildly distracting. Moreover, the entire on-line medium is in flux. Is a newspaper site going to become a portal to video images and audio feeds? Will moving images simply overwhelm the printed word? What happens to “journalistic objectivity” in the process? (Look to cable TV news for one answer — it tanks. Cue the celebrities! Roll the violent footage! Run the gotcha sound bite!)

The other question mark is revenue. Clark’s decision to drop the Tribune's Tuesday edition cuts distribution and printing costs. But producing an on-line daily, by rights, should increase editorial costs. All Clark says in his announcement is “…we will employ fewer people in some departments.”

He had the chance to say which departments, but he conspicuously didn’t. Specifically, is he cutting editorial? If he were adding reporters — as he should to fill the news hole — he has every reason to tell us.

Reading between the lines we can conclude that the cost cutting on the production/distribution side isn’t going to free up enough revenue to bolster news coverage. The decline in advertising revenue in print isn’t offset by an increase of on-line ad revenue.

That’s the problem plaguing the industry — and journalism in general.

The question we as citizen-readers need to ask is whether the changes will leave us better or worse informed about the world around us.

I believe that, taken as a whole, the changes have the potential to leave us far better off, but only if — and it is a big “if” — we, as readers, take responsibility for seeking out the best, most trustworthy information available.

The journalist’s job is to make it available — and get paid a living wage for the work.

Getting a parental grip on media

The Internet played a frightening role in the recent attack by six teenage girls and two boys that took place in Lakeland, Florida. The assailants of 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay, a cheerleader, seemed to be inspired by the prospects of posting a video of the beating on the Internet.

The New York Times story about the assault referred to several media connections to the beating. Joan Rutkowski, my friend and colleague at Media Think, the Northwest media literacy center, has highlighted the following references made in The Times article.

- Authorities say the young assailants intended to use the attack to become Internet celebrities.
- The case should raise awareness about the Internet’s power to desensitize young people to violence, said one expert.
- The victim’s mother commented: “For whatever reason, this MySpace, my-you, this YouTube has gone too far. It’s just too much.”
- Her husband went even further, declaring that Internet companies were to blame for what happened. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said, “MySpace is the Antichrist for children.”

There's no doubt that parents — of potential perpetrators and potential victims — have a problem. Of course, the perpetrators are also victims — often of parental neglect.

Simply put, parents can not allow impressionable, unsupervised children to spend hours in an “alternate Internet universe” with norms that often encourage abusive, bullying or violent behavior. In one form or another, the video experience gets played out in the real world. Manifestations range from being inured or insensitive to violence to behaving violently.

The Florida attack seemed like an episode from a video "Lord of the Flies" desert island.

In our work with Media Think, Joan and I have heard parents vent their frustration at their inability to retrieve their kids from cyberspace. In response, Joan and I are preparing a discussion course to be offered through the community education program of Portland Community College this fall. If possible, we would like parents from the same elementary or middle school school to enroll the course. As was discovered too late in Lakeland, entire school communities must address this issue head-on. (By the way, next week is TV-Turnoff Week, an excellent time to begin.)

Here is how the course will be listed in the catalog:

The Media-Mindful Family:
Creating Alternatives to a Screen-Filled Childhood

Concerned about how media harms your child’s health, self-image, social life and school performance? Learn how to address media issues in your family and peer group through this practical, group-centered discussion course.

And here are some of the topics we hope to cover over the eight weekly sessions:

- Media: The Competing Parent and the Importance of Story
- Framing the Conversation with your Child: Principles of Media Literacy
- Social and Cultural Effects of Uncritical Media consumption
- Health Consequences
- Identity, Social Needs and Values in Cyberspace
- Cultivating Media Mindfulness at Home and in the Peer Community
- What’s Next: Networking and Staying Ahead of Media Change

If you know of any parents who might be interested, let me know. You can write me at ricks@mediathink.org.

Self-censorship, freedom of speech and the internet

A friend has told me that he would comment on recent Red Electric postings, but he is hesitant because what he has to say would become part of his Google-able "public record" and one day might be used against him.

In particular, my friend, who is an atheist, took exception to the recent post regarding the "Ten Media Commandments."

I find his concern troubling. Certainly we need to be circumspect about what we say on the internet, but not to the point that we suppress what we legitimately want to say in the course of civil discourse.

To me "freedom of speech" is worthless unless we can use it. Moreover, those who would judge us and reject us because they silently disagree with what we have written, are part of the problem. We who speak out with open minds and invite discussion are part of the solution.

We should be free to be wrong—or right.

Of course, freedom of speech is also the freedom NOT to speak, but our reason for remaining silent shouldn't be fear.

The intriguing idea called the "spiral of silence" posits that unless we articulate and repeat an idea, it will die. In the same way, the suppression of speech through fear of reprisal is nothing less than the killing of ideas.

Just because an idea is "bad" or wrong or even hateful shouldn't mean that it is suppressed. Rejected after debate, yes, but not killed.

Rereading this, it strikes me that my friend's concern, though overtly about freedom of speech, may in fact be as much about freedom of religion—or to be more exact, freedom of non-religious belief, or atheism.

Significantly, the First Amendment protects both and, as we see in his case, they are inextricably bound.

Reflections in Time's mirror

So Time magazine's cover says that "You" (who, me?) are the "Person of the Year."

According to Time, each of us deserves the recognition because we are empowered by the medium I'm using right now to reach you...and that you can use to reach me.

We are empowered by our new webs of connection.

But the fact is that once we log off, it's back to reality, and reality these days is a dangerous place.

War, terrorism, global warming and, yes, nuclear annihilation. You know the list.

Look into Time's cover, which is a literally a mirror. There is a warning there. Our focus on self and cyberspace may threaten the future of the planet.

Certainly this medium motives, educates, informs, mobilizes and inspires. It forges friendships and creates new communities, of a sort.

But it also diverts, distorts, deceives, demeans, trivializes and addicts.

The Internet will be what we make it through our choices as individuals, and as a society. What we say and portray, and read and see in cyberspace increasingly will determine what we do in the world beyond the margins of Time magazine's cover and the frames of our computer screens.

Will the web, with all its power and allure, engage us in or disengage us from the work we need to do?

A couple nights ago, I was reminded of our vulnerability as I was reading Lewis Thomas' "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony."

Thomas was a research pathologist, medical school dean, and astute essayist. His essays often illuminated the "big picture" by looking at small things, including cells, insects and words.

He died in 1993, an eon ago as technology shapes time.

One essay in "Late Night Thoughts..." (the book was a score at the Hillsdale Holiday Book Sale), offers this about the state of pre-Internet humanity:

"So far, we have learned how to be useful to each other only when we collect in small groups — families, circles of friends, once in a while (although still rarely) committees. The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of Nature....As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile to be trusted."

Thomas wrote that 20 years ago, but his words resonate with the questions I'm asking: Have we, as a species, matured in two remarkable decades? Will the Internet make the difference? Will our social and technological evolution be joined in time to save us?