Media Unlimited

"Yes, Williams’s perception launched me on to my own book. After many years of writing about how news is composed, how entertainment is composed, who decides on them and who pays attention to them, I’d been discomfited with the academic habit of thinking everything is a text and thinking of everyone as a graduate student who has nothing to do except interpret texts. When in fact, mostly people are not so much studying texts as they are immersed in them, careening through the torrential speed and volume of the 24/7 media society. The media torrent is a phenomenon in itself. Which is not to say that it’s content neutral, that content doesn’t matter, but that there is this huge social phenomenon: namely that what people spend most of their time doing in our civilization (when they’re neither sleeping nor working) is connecting to media. And actually they’re even relating to media during much of the time they’re ostensibly working. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I tried in the book to look at precedents but primarily I looked at the sheer proliferation of means of delivery, including sounds as an important element. So I quickstep through history, the history of saturation, the speed of communication change, and I write about navigational strategy – which everybody develops, whether they know it or not, in striving to manage the media torrent. You mean is this good for civilization? Well you can’t unplug the media torrent at will. This is our civilization, and I suppose I’m more concerned that people take seriously the immensity of this phenomenon, in which we’re immersed. We have more experience of people via electronics than we have of face-to-face contact. I don’t view this with automatic alarm, or as an occasion for fireworks. There are elements that are beneficial, there are elements that are sort of horrific. I can’t pretend to have a particular line on it, except saying, “There it is, we’d better stare at it.” I do. The crisis in advertising – in other words, in the financing of newspapers – overlays a longer-running decline. If you look at the US, time spent with newspapers has actually been declining for years, long before the internet. So in 1966, 75 per cent of Americans said they read the newspaper either every day or most days. By 1986, that figure was down to 51 per cent. Among the under-30s, 60 per cent had said yes in 1966, by 1986 that was down to 29 per cent. There have been large shifts in sensibility, that didn’t just begin with laptops. So I think we’re in some big cultural upheaval, and one feature of it is the premium on seeing things through pictures, and hearing things through sound, knowing the world in those ways. And there’s a decline in reading newspapers, a decline in reading books, and the situation has been exacerbated enormously by the siphoning of advertising away from newspapers, and also by the inability of anyone to figure out how to monetize the internet version of newspapers. Newspapers remain central to people’s diet of online-ness, but if it were indeed possible for newspapers to sustain themselves economically by figuring out how to exploit the availability of the internet, it would seem to me that someone would have figured it out by now. People have been thrashing around about this for years, asking, “Where’s the new business model for the newspaper?” And they haven’t found an answer. In the meantime there are a proliferation of ways in which people can entertain themselves. We underestimate how much of newspaper consumption has always been undertaken for purposes of entertainment. Much of what people look for in a newspaper experience is a feeling. We may think we’re reading it for information, but what we’re actually reading it for, as I argue in my book, is to have a certain kind of sensation – a disposable emotion. And now there are so many other ways to achieve that. Newspapers are competing with every other so-called delivery system that’s out there. The old world is going fast. I don’t mean it’s going to disappear, but newspapers are obviously very unstable and weakened. There is on-going discussion at Columbia Journalism School about such matters. I will tell you my prejudice. I don’t think that non-profits can by themselves constitute a solution to the problem. They are imperfect, more than imperfect: they are sluggish institutions. They can also be high-handed, there’s not a lot of democratic accountability. Obviously there’s a place for foundation support, but I don’t see non-profits as an adequate alternative to government subvention of some sort. The trick, as in Canada and elsewhere, is to insulate finance from control. I think the Brits have pretty convincingly demonstrated that it’s possible to do it via the BBC. Another model is Scandinavian countries, which subsidize newspapers without regard to their political positions. I don’t think anyone ought to be naive about the dangers of government support, but I do think we need to have some creative thinking about how to subsidize what is, after all, a national need. Without a substantial change in the system of newspaper finance, we’re heading into a distressing bifurcation – high-level journalism for a very restricted public while everyone else eats cupcakes, or crumbs. We need multiple models. Private ownership is fine as long as the proprietors are willing to live with single-digit profits. I don’t think the news media should be exclusively government-supported. But the news is a public good, like an airline system in which planes don’t fly into each other. The availability of intelligently compiled, serious information is a prerequisite for democratic life. So the question is not whether there should be public funding, but how to manage it, so that it doesn’t become Orwellian."