As I get older, with more experience, I see that news is like time. No, not Time the pretend-news magazine, ‘time’ as in ‘what time is it’ and ‘are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet’.
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Attention to news is a relative thing, unique to every individual, just as the awareness of time is keenly attuned to every one of us, fitted like a fingerprint on our hands.
What’s news to one is noise to another, or even not present at all. Just as time appears to slow down or speed up for a given person depending upon the circumstances, a news item’s importance grows and shrinks for a person depending upon the circumstances.
Given this, the “5 w’s” (who, what, when, where, why) of a given event is important only if the eye of the beholder thinks it’s important.
Today’s selection of news has changed drastically in the lifetimes of those who’ve ever actually used rabbit-ears, so the possibility of finding “important” news has increased to a level that was only dreamt of by science-fiction writers in the days of those telescopic tinny things.
Old TV with rabbit-ear antennae. Actually the TV’s back then had two antennae physically attached to them – one for ‘VHF’ (Very High Frequency’) channels and another for ‘UHF’ (‘Ultra High Frequency’) channels. When one changed the channel, one also had to usually move the antennae around to get a clearer picture. So it was actually a good thing that those TV’s didn’t have remote controls.
Today’s information world means we can choose when, where and what we wish to know about – a big difference from having to wait until 6 and 10 pm to get the dose of TV news, with a newspaper in the morning and possibly in the evening on the way home from work. With smartphones we can even get news pushed to our pockets as it is being published.
In the days of rabbit-eared TV’s we had radio news – a medium older than TV – which was very close to today’s smartphones with regards to having an omnipresent information channel to hand, but news broadcast was limited to the channel and time restrictions of the broadcasters. And it wasn’t until the late 1980’s-early 1990’s that we had affordable units that one could actually comfortably carry in a pocket (remember hip-hop 80s-style ‘boom-boxes’, all?).
gnarly dude, totally rad
For radio news, the selection, like TV and print, was limited to the editor’s choice of items, so even though we could tune into an all-news channel on the AM spectrum it was a hit-and-miss effort regarding getting news about our actual interests. Fr international or long-distance news we either received it filtered through a local radio station physically present in our area, or invest in expensive ham radio equipment if we wanted to listen in to far-away places during real-time coverage. No, not ham as in bacon, ham as in “amateurish” or “incompetent” (i.e. “ham actor”) – a popular label spread about which seems to be mainstream media’s attempt to discredit news sources outside of their domain.
One nice thing about Ham Radio culture and followers is that the genre spawns books like “22 Radio and Receiver Projects for the Evil Genius” which was the closest thing we had back then to hacker technology (please see my comments about “Hackers vs ‘Evil Internet Bad Guy'” on my “About The Monkey” page).
So today, we can select news of our choosing – still limited within the scope of the publisher and presenting medium and technology, but as close as we can get to actually being in a given place an time when an event occurs. That’s a very powerful thing for news consumers and very scary for news hunter-gatherers whose job it is to grab attention away from ‘puter and mobile device screens.
If you’re interested at all about who and what is controlling information presented as ‘news’ in the popular media outlets, the article I’m linking to, and the site it is based from is a very good source for this. type of information It’s not sensationalistic or conspiratorial – rather, it’s well thought-out and covers a lot of ground.
I especially like the concept presented in the article relating to a possible future of news collection and dispersion:
What may be more likely is that a new ecosystem could spring out of current networks of professional and amateur news organizations, using the cheap or free infrastructure of the Internet to create traction.
Tom Glaisyer, a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation, for example, envisions the emergence of a connected world of public service publishing based around libraries, community groups, and journalism schools, many of whom are already active participants in publishing to local communities. Such a vision relies on the idea that the majority of newsgathering will fall to more dispersed sources, some of them professional journalists and many of them not. “These will be new information institutions, and look very different from what we had in the past,” says Glaisyer. Context and analysis might as easily come from experts in the field publishing their own material as from news organizations.
Read more here at the original link from the Columbia Journalism Review, entitled “Signal and Noise”, written by Emily Bell: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/signal_and_noise.php?page=1