Surfacing

I'm coming up for air after an academic crunch like few I've ever known.  I have to say that I can't remember a time when I've had so many exciting opportunities to get involved in new ventures, and though I'm getting some good coaching from those who love me in the art of saying 'no', there are some things that are still just too juicy to pass up.  This blog has obviously suffered from my attention being caught elsewhere, but now I think I'm ready to begin making recompense for this.  I'm enjoying my first weekend "off" since sometime in the summer, doing a fair bit too much eating, actually reading a novel (though some accusations have flown that Dad's Reading a Comic Book -- which I guess is true in a way and for which I can muster no shame).  But I'd have to say that the  high point of my weekend was an unexpected chance to hear Robert Kennedy Jr. speak on Friday night at a visionary local conference called "Rethink Waterloo."

Robert Kennedy's career as an environmental activist and lawyer took off in the most extraordinary way -- after an arrest and conviction in 1983 for heroin possession, his sentence included 1500 hours of community service, which he completed by working for the Riverkeepers.  Now, as chairman of the umbrella organization the Waterkeepers, he does legal work to protect the waters of New York's Hudson Valley and also promotes environmental awareness through books and media appearances.  Kennedy had much to say on  matters of sustainable development, of how a truly unhindered free market in which we paid the real costs of our deeds would decrease pollution ("show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy"), and of how tractable solutions to carbon-free energy independence are within our reach for a fraction of what is being paid to protect the fossil fuel economy. What really caught my attention, though, and what I can't stop thinking about, is his discussion of information, media and democracy.

The crux of his argument was that in the United States, there is no longer even a semblance of democracy because there is no real way for people to obtain accurate information.  An uninformed public simply cannot exercise their democratic rights.  Monopolistic media giants like the Fox Network  have come to dominate the airwaves and to shield US citizens from the truth of what is happening in their own country.  So then this led me to wonder about the Internet, and I was glad when a young student in the audience asked the question.  When it's so easy for us to pass information to others (as I'm doing right now for instance) how is it possible for people to be lied to?  Kennedy's answer was interesting, and the part of the whole evening that I'm still chewing on.  He said that the differences between our access to information now and, say 40 years ago, is what he characterized as the Walter Cronkite factor.  In the 1960s, there was a time and a place where virtually all Americans could gather to hear a non-partisan voice whom they could trust to give them what they could accept as the unvarnished truth.  The difference now, he said, is that though many of us can dial into the Web to find access to information, our searches are often biased by our own preconceptions.  Personally, though I try to avoid thinking in terms of sides and wings, I lean to the left, so when I want to see commentary on the US situation I go to Huffington.  If I leaned right, I'd go to, well, er, I just did a quick search to look for right wing blogs and therein lies the problem.  This is nothing new -- in discussions of everything wiki, we all know that there is a problem with the provenance of information on the Internet.

So how do we solve the conundrum that in an age where network technology gives us the tools to connect to one another over longer distances and shorter times than ever before, we seem to know less than ever about what is actually happening in the world because we don't know who or what to believe?  The solution must somehow lie in building decentralized knowledge networks to which everyone can contribute (which I guess is what we already have), but to find new ways to assess the provenance of those networks.  How do we build a virtual Walter Cronkite, a current events Wikipedia that can both grow and adapt fast enough to be useful and in which there is broad enough participation to provide a Cronkite level of trustworthiness?  There's no road back to the 1960s. The world is too complicated, interconnected, and too rapidly changing now.  How do we build a technology that concedes to our human natures, allows us to participate fully in democratic life, and provides the protection that we need desperately now from malevolent forces that would rather keep us in darkness and ignorance to achieve their own criminally selfish ends?

Comments

[Kirsten]

I am a big fan of both Robert Kennedy Jr and especially his father, and I have been paying close attention to RFK Jr's speeches as well. There is one element that RFK Jr apparently did not mention in the speech where you were at (or you just didn't blog about it): the demands of the new media age are different. In the 1960's presidential candidates (for example) would be followed by journalists in the travelling press pool, just like now. At the end of the day they would make their 5 minute video or radio piece, or write their article for next day's newspaper. Nowadays, the same travelling press pool is filled with tv crews that broadcast EVERYTHING live, that not just write stuff for next day's paper, but blog within seconds (!) after the candidate has said something, etc... On tv then, there is no more time for investigation, depth, serious analysis... because everybody has to comment immediately after a debate or speech or townhall meeting. Again, within seconds they have to say something insightful, even though they haven't even had the time to think about it themselves... It's all crappy journalism, and it's all over the place. Putting some pundits on a show is cheap and easy. Sending out investigative journalists to seek out serious issues is not only expensive and slow, every story is forgotten within days anyway... so why bother?

All media outlets want more viewers, more listeners, more readers... no matter how. And getting them requires to be the fastest. Being the fastest means your work will be sloppy.

And there's your problem.

[colin]

Hi Kirsten,

Thanks for visiting. You're right about the problem -- so given that we can't go back in time, what's the solution? Effort is sacrificed in favour of speed because the cost of communication is low compared to a Cronkite on a sound stage in a studio or an investigative series in the Washington Post. Or is it? I keep thinking (perhaps naively) that the solution must have something to do with the actions of large, decentralized networks of thinking people who are receiving these instant messages and responding to them. But that assumes that we're all engaged citizens in a democracy. Which assumes a lot. How do you make more people care about what is happening? And why don't more see how urgently their participation is needed?

[Justin]

take away their savings, their homes, their stocks, their retirement funds, and they might start to care.

Goodness, that's a lot to hope for! It could never happen!

wait a second...

[colin]

HA!