You don’t often find justifications for journalism with this kind of title, but as the length of this post indicates (approx. 2300 words) I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing for quite some time. The first traces of this line of enquiry I can find appeared on Happy Antipodean on 14 September 2015 in a post titled “Studying journalism is not just a vocational course” which was about training. A light piece in response to a Sydney Morning Herald story that’d just appeared, it contained this:
Storytelling is an essential human activity that shows no likelihood of disappearing. And all industry sectors can use storytellers to build their businesses. In fact they need them, in the same way a viable electorate needs journalists in order to make the critical decisions that national stability relies on. They don't call it the media – the layer in the middle, the information viaduct – for nothing.
On 2 July 2018 I expanded on this point in a post titled “The articulation of stories and the dynamics of progress”, which I include in its entirety below.
On 29 June at 6.49am an account on Twitter named ‘Stand For Something Even If You're Sitting Down’ tweeted the following:
[President Donald] Trump: The press is the enemy of the American people.
Milo [Yiannopoulos, a right-wing commentator]: The press should be killed.
Shooter [Jarrod Ramos, who killed journalists in Maryland in 2018]: Kills members of the press.
The Left: Trump and Milo are dangerous and culpable in this.
The Right: The Left needs to be civil.
We tell ourselves stories all the time as we strive to function as members of a community that sustains us. Such stories are essential to its proper functioning and to maintaining our ties to it. They cement us within its fabric as essential parts of it. They are the glue that binds each community together, and part of that process involves us articulating aspects of the stories that animate our social lives, to form coherent narratives. The above tweet is a symptom of this articulation, where each step in the process of meaning-creation stems from the one that comes before. We locate ourselves within this process of meaning-creation by helping to tell either the whole story from beginning to end, or just one part of it that can then be taken up by the next person in the chain.
That chain ties us to the earth, from which all wealth derives. The earth sustains us as the stories we tell each other sustain us in our various tribes. They work in two ways: to keep us together and to keep others out. While the first aim is important for our survival, the second can prevent us from learning new things. So while stories can teach people entering the tribe what it is important for them to know, so that they can help the whole function more effectively, they can also exclude ideas that might function to help the tribe survive and prosper.
In our communities, the tribes operate much like sporting teams that are competing for the scarce resource of victory. In this flawed scenario, which is a zero-sum game, only one team can win, and so each member of it works to the utmost extent of his or her capacities to destroy the effectiveness of the opposition. In this earnest game we strengthen the bonds that keep us together by helping to articulate the stories that sustain the tribe, but we might also lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is for both teams to prosper and to increase the amount of wealth the earth surrenders, for the same amount of energy expended. Sometimes we need to borrow from the playbook of the opposition, and use ideas that have been articulated and developed by that tribe, in order to strengthen the chain that binds us to the earth. This is called “progress”.
At the end of the month I was at it again as the bug had bitten and I was on a roll. This time the post was titled “Intolerance and incivility on social media”. The bit I want to include is this:
They say that there are "echo chambers" online where people just see views that conform to their own, because people only follow people with views that are similar to theirs. But especially with Twitter hashtags, you now get to see what people of all walks of life are thinking and saying. And often tweets from people you follow might be in the form of a retweet from an ideological enemy accompanied by additional commentary refuting what the original tweet had said, but you still get to see what had been written. I think there is actually more awareness now than ever before of what people on the other side of the fence think and do.
But what is true is that the conversations that happen across the divide are very low-quality. Flame wars erupt, sarcasm is used, and people just dig in, refusing to budge an inch from cherished positions. It’s not at all like a collegiate forum where robust academic debates take place in an ambience where the right of everyone to express themselves unobstructed is respected, but more like the schoolyard, where hurtful things are said casually to exclude, to wound, and to objectify without considering the consequences.
On 2 December 2018 I published a post titled “Ego, like tribal loyalty, cements people’s identity” which contained the following elucidation of my theory of narrative.
If you don’t have a healthy ego you’re probably suffering from a mental illness. It is what keeps us confident and “happy” (that indefinable feeling of rightness that characterises our waking life, even if we are not aware of it most of the time). You don’t want to be without an ego. In its absence your life would be hell.
But ego has a drawback even while it keeps everything ticking along smoothly: it keeps new ideas out of our consciousness. We privilege what we already know and cleave to ideas that are central to our identity. This aspect of ego makes it a liability in some circumstances. We won’t listen. We reject things outright unless they’re wrapped correctly. We say “No” when we perhaps should think twice.
For groups of people, the function of ego is carried out by tribal loyalty. We might all be individuals, with own tastes and preferences, but we cannot survive alone, without a community to support us. The group has its own language, its common referents, its beliefs even. It has its icons and its leaders and its spokespeople. It has traditions and lore and ways for members to use to conduct themselves so that everyone gets along well. Pledging loyalty to the tribe, however, has, like ego for the individual, the downside risk that it serves to quarantine the group from valuable input from outside. People who are identified as outsiders are distrusted or even mocked and scorned. Their ideas are diminished by sarcasm and other rhetorical methods used to create community, or ignored.
So, good ideas can have trouble getting in. Bad ideas can be perpetuated regardless of their merit simply through common usage. If someone you trust says something that is factually incorrect, you are likely to believe that it is true. This happens all the time in the public sphere, where most people outsource their critical faculties to political parties. Individual tastes only go so far; mostly our preferences are predictable, and our likes and dislikes can be accurately mapped just by learning which group we belong to.
In August I examined a flame war that Australian journalist Peter van Onselen had been caught up in. For a while he quit Twitter, but made an exception for a colleague. As I reported in a post titled “Extreme views get all the attention”:
At 9.06am on 17 August, van Onselen tweeted to Fairfax journalist Jacqueline Maley: “Yours is the only tweet I’m responding to, I said I’m no longer using twitter [sic] for more than posts [because] the vile abuse I’ve received has stunned me. The left right spectrum is more of a curved U leaving extreme left & right with much in common. That’s all I was saying. Signing off.”
I went on, later:
The sensible centre is being hollowed out as people take sides and reward the outlets that buttress their personal biases with their cash. But partisanship is not good for democracy. What we need are outlets that look at individual policies and judge them based on their merits, not on the basis of whether we support the political party that espouses them.
“Social media is bad for journalism” ran the headline on a post I put up on Happy Antipodean on 5 April 2019:
Social media is great for sharing links but the quality of material being produced in recent years is not encouraging. BuzzFeed for a start, with its quizzes and text-poor stories and endless sequences of quoted tweets, is a bad sign.
Then you have the newspapers that pimp their stories to get subscribers. The quality doesn't matter to people as long as the bias conforms with their own. Some, like the Guardian, ask for donations and run campaigns to fund stories on specific topics. But with the groupthink evident on social media begging for ideologically-bent material in preference to objective stories written by ethical journalists, it's hard to see how we can be well served by such organisations.
You also have "indie" media which is run on a shoestring and which runs complete nonsense that people applaud and retweet endlessly, as though the vomit they are promoting were some rare souffle offered up by the kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef.
The kinds of extremism that thrives in social media, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, is precisely the wrong kind of influence you want to have operating on journalism. In the old days, university graduates used to complain about the hysterical headlines produced by the major urban tabloids. Words with the same kind of rhetorical audacity as statements that are made by politicians intent on demolishing the arguments of their opponents. But with social media this same kind of rhetoric is ubiquitous.
On 27 February 2019 I wrote a post titled “Group behaviour and popular narratives” that contained the following further elucidation of my ideas, particularly as they related to groups.
People actually don't want to be made to think, they want to be made to feel comfortable with their existing biases. This is what makes them adhere to groups in the first place. It’s quite natural. You see this clearly with both politics and with the arts. In the latter case, people gravitate to the familiar and the routine, the thing that most closely resembles what they have already consumed at one time or another. This is because they remember the feeling it gave them last time and they want to feel the same way again. It’s about pleasure, and we are nothing if not pleasure-seeking animals. But it’s also about safety (we feel good when we feel safe).
With politics, what you find is that people will unthinkingly endorse views that conform to their political party's policy platform. People don't want anything "challenging" (although that is a normal way for critics to compliment a work of art, such as a movie or a novel that they like). People want what they had before, except better and cheaper.
With public policy, problems usually arise where you find regressive thinking that derives from people’s tendency to operate in mobs. Demagogues are a problem sometimes but once you have rule by the demos the problem actually derives in most cases from the ways that groups behave.
We actually shouldn't be following party platforms. What we should be doing is choosing the policies that are going to achieve the best results, regardless of which party endorses them. Unfortunately, people are unthinking creatures who like to stick close to the group. So we will continue to swing wildly from one side to the other even while the big problems such as climate change and wealth inequality, both of which are complex and worsening in their impacts, and which require concerted action, resist the solutions we throw up from time to time in a haphazard fashion.
In a post put up on 23 September of the same year titled “Social media and the cultural elites” I wrote:
[T]he cultural elites are enthusiastic proponents of social media and use it as aggressively as your average (left-wing or right-wing) troll in order to promote their favourite views regardless how narrow these might be. They are not babes in the wood, nor are they merely subject to unwarranted censure by an ignorant rabble. They are participating with eyes wide open in a system of communication that encourages verbal abuse at worst and at least an ugly contempt for opponents.
Now that we’re all paddling in the water, how does it feel? Do you feel comfortable? How should you react if your feelings are not respected? What about your own conduct? Are you entirely blameless if some people flame you or denigrate your words? If they disrespect you? Do you respect others? Is being “nice” important or is good policy the only worthy goal? What kind of policy is created according to reprehensible behaviour? Does it matter? Does good policy even matter?
Who says it’s good?!
You do. Or s/he does. Or else you all say it’s bad. Either way, you’re complicit. It’s actually your policy. The polls tell us so. This brings me back to another 2015 post, this one titled “A ‘febrile’ media culture or radical transparency?” It was in response to just-deposed PM Tony Abbott’s parting slash at the commentariat. I talked about how the public sphere had changed since a large proportion of the community was using Twitter.
[T]he thing is that the whole relationship between the public and politicians has changed due to the ever-on nature of the public sphere, enabled through social media. There is nowhere to hide any more once the soundbite has been launched into the ether. If there is any dissimulation, or plain treachery, or just day-to-day spin, you will be found out. That then will cause a wave of opinion to start in cyberspace and this will lead journalists to find ways to satisfy the appetite thus kindled.
Scott Morrison is more used to working in this new type of space, as his recent policy shift in favour of greentech indicates. So even though a lot of what happens on social media is reprehensible at least, and damaging at worst, at least we see the message getting through.
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