The other day I talked to an old university friend whom I had lost contact with for over 30 years, and that is weird in these days and age, given the multitude of social media and networks that exist. Especially since she is a high-tech person and has worked/working in companies like Alta Vista (do you remember that?), Yahoo!, and a few others.
We inevitably talked about our lives, personal, professional, and other common friends/relations from that period. We talked a lot about our views on the society and life and how we, “older people”, see the current trends among the young generation and the impact of technology and changing values (a common phenomenon in every generation when it gets older). We also had a stimulative conversation about media and democracy, and that is what I want to talk about in this post.
We found out that we are both social media shy/suspicious people, although I am quite active (or at least I think I am) on Linkedin. But what got our conversation going was our convergent views on the need to support media and press, as we both see a free and reliable press/media the underpinning of democracy. Unfortunately, one of the big casualties of the technology-enabled trivial life is the traditional investigative and fact driven journalism and media.
There have been ample articles and comments about the demise of traditional media due to internet and shifting consumer habits, so I am not going to add yet another (probably not well written element) to it, but the fake news (sorry alternative facts) sites aside, I am getting tired of media, especially TV media, that use Twitter comments as their source of investigation. TV had already damaged fact-based journalism, but at least it also provided wide access to news. It was Washington Post that broke the Watergate scandal, but it was ABC, CBS and NBC that made it global. It was a collection of “print media” that broke the Panama Papers, but it was CNN that globalized it. It was the New York Times that recently broke the news about a number of botched civilian bombings/killings of the US military in Syria and Iraq. And on, and on.
Now, however, many of these traditional “journal” media are held by shoestring budgets or are owned by powerful people and companies. Their pages are used by social media organizations to brainwash people (mostly young ones) to zap through headlines, generally picked for them through Artificial Intelligence algorithms. And that is where democracy becomes an endangered concept, where the ease of “sounding knowledgeable” deprives us from “understanding” things and what philosophers call “critical thinking”.
I try to support reliable, fact based, and investigative media through donations, but it would be even better to do it through subscription of their online services (providing investigative journalism should not be an act of charity). Obviously, I am not subscribing/donating to a whole bunch, but enough to make sure I have the capability to understand, rather than to recite. I truly believe if we want our democracy to survive, paying for such a service (news) is one way to not become the product.
Paris, November, 22, 2021
Zeejay