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The Hypermedia Hazard
But the problem isn't only responsibility and ethics, it's technology. There's too much media, and when it's combined with a dreadful and scientifically complex story, and rapid-fire, immediate and ubiquitous information technologies, the results are disturbing, as well as dangerous. Even the most serious media executives seem unwilling to even consider the unthinking and frightening way complex stories like this are transmitted, reported and explained.
A generation ago, most Americans got their news once or twice a day -? from daily papers and evening network newscasts -? no matter what was going on. These were delayed, filtered media. Information could be transmitted, digested and organized before it was presented to the public. No matter how serious the story, you couldn't wallow in it for too long -- evening newscasts only lasted a half hour and there was only so much space in the paper. And reporters and editors had time to consider and check some of the information they passed along. In the Age of Hypermedia, it's commonplace to pass along information immediately and continuously before it can be verified or considered. The public, already frightened, seems to quickly lose track of what is factual and what isn't -- a perfect environment for panic.
But digital and screen technologies, from cable and satellite transmissions to the Net (especially the Web), have created an immediate, unfiltered, 24/7 kind of information delivery system. The mediastream is incessant, even when there is no new information to support it, or little time to make sure it's accurate or coherent. We are told continually, for example, that terrorist cells are dormant and waiting to strike again, and each new anthrax spore seems to have its own cable news hour.
Websites like CNN's bring the news to consumers, giving subscribers e-mail headlines all day long. Like the Net and the Web, cable TV channels are on all the time, every day, desperate and dependent on vivid and disturbing imagery, information, discussion and argument, even when the information isn?t reliable, the discussion not useful or the argument unhelpful. A staggering amount of alarmist information -- innaccurate or best incomplete -- has swamped the country in the past month, yet little is corrected or explained in the continuous rush of reports. This tidal wave of screen and e-information creates a distorted environment, a surreal sense of being surround by an ugly story. This is, literally, hyperreality. Trauma becomes pervasive, and all-encompassing. Normal, routine news and information -- that is, any sense of normalcy -- is drowned out, which adds to the Hypermedia-spawned environment. Even though the vast majority of people are living, working and behaving routinely, the images pouring out of screens suggests just the opposite.
Hypermedia have thus become a civic nightmare. They helped create the hysterical atmosphere surrounding the death of Princess Diana; they helped elevate a sordid presidential scandal ?- the Monica Lewinsky affair -? into a national political crisis.
And now, since the much more serious and legitimately newsworthy attacks on the World Trade Center, and especially following the anthrax mailings around the country, Hypermedia are generating waves of misinformation, confusion and panic. Politicians, reporters and bureaucrats rush in front of TV cameras before they know the facts or have considered how to present them. Images of death, destruction, and hazmat response teams are triggering waves of anxiety and depression. Even though only a handful of Americans have actually contracted anthrax, and it is treatable with available antibiotics, the House of Representatives fled the Capitol last week. People all over the country are flooding emergency rooms for nose swab tests and calling 911 when the see artificial sweetener on a coffee counter or flour residue on a pizza crust. Meanwhile, lobbyists, politicians and professional ideologues crowd the cable channels to take advantage of all that airtime, squabbling over everything from military strategy to airport security. National unity is not sustainable in an environment shaped byh Hypermedia. Whether there is any real news or not, you can turn on MSNBC or Fox or CNN any time of any day and get some saturation coverage. Hypermedia spreads rumors, prompts action where none is required, panic and anxiety where none is necessary.
Meanwhile, as with Desert Storm, the military conflict has been morphed into a techno-war, covered mostly in terms of exotic new weapons systems, analyzed by the generals and military analysts who created them. The corporatized networks no longer pay for enough foreign correspondents to cover conflicts; they prefer to rent military retirees who can talk about AC-130 Spectre gunships and their firepower.
Learning to cope with Hypermedia is an essential survival skill in difficult times. People are learning not to believe much of what they see, read or hear, even when it comes from the Speaker of the House of Representatives (who rushed to microphones Thursday to report -- falsely -- that anthrax spores were making their way through the Capitol ventilation system) and to take their media in small, managed regimens. You might try watching the news for 15 minutes in the morning, then again for 15 minutes at night. You'll be amazed at how little happens in between, and how much of it can wait.
It's no accident that anthrax is being mailed to media organizations. Hypermedia has become the dream tool of terrorists everywhere, sowing precisely the same sort of overblown rhetoric ("things will never be the same in this country again"), and fear that prompted the blowhards who run Congress to shut most of the Capitol down last week, even though the health threat to them and their staffs was both minimal and treatable. Sparked in part by a panicky media, Congressional leaders missed the chance to demonstrate that we aren't in terrible danger. Instead, they embraced the terrorist message that we are falling apart.
In a curious way, this is an old story for America's bizarre relationship with technology. Nobody makes more of it than we do, or is less prepared to deal with its consequences, from airline safety to hypermedia to biological terrorism. Sometimes it seems our ignorance about how technology really works -- and what its consequences really are -- will ultimately do more damage than terrorists can.
Learning how to cope with this Hypermedia -- especially in a crisis -- is now as critical to survival as combatting terrorism.
Yeah, remember that time CNN.com blew up a truck in front of the US Embassy?
Somebody should give this guy a medal !
From a retired military weapons, munitions, and training expert : The truth about Bio/Terror/Chem Weapons.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Katz is trying to inspire us to think by writing the most thoughtless drivel he can come up with! That way we'll be inspired to actually wrestle with these ideas for ourselves and come up with our own answers!
Pure genius!!!
Once again Katz whines about the obvious. Maybe the problem is that nobody in the media has a fsking clue. They're nothing but shills for the political machine. Look at the anthrax coverage. The FL anthrax broke at the same time as the bombing started. The media effectively ignored it, citing "not wanting to start a panic", and "no evidence it's related to 9/11" 2 days later, it gets a sidebar and another day later, Wolf Blitzer is apologizing for not covering it.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
National TV news was much the same way for many years; people trusted 60 minutes and Walter Cronkite because those shows were not expected to pay for themselves. They were paid for by advertising revenue from other parts of the network, the idea was that if people trusted your news people, they would like your network and watch your other shows, too. Having a good evening news program was a public service designed to maintain viewer loyalty to the networks.
Enter the Cable News Network. How has this changed things? Well, how does CNN exist? On advertising dollars. How do you generate add revenue? You provide viewers for those ads. And how do you provide viewers? You repeat the same sensationalistic story over and over again, with a slight variation each time so that people are afraid to turn the channel.
"Oh my God! Anthrax is everywhere! I'd better stay home and watch CNN today instead of going to work and providing for my family and reassuring them that their chances of contracting anthrax are about one-tenth that of them winning the Florida lottery."
Any time the presentation of news is contingent on that news' ability to attract advertising dollars (whether explicitly or implicitly -- I'm not saying CNN only runs stories that it thinks will attract advertisers, but they sure as hell don't run things that will offend, or deal with issues that the majority of Americans aren't interested in) there is something dreadfully wrong. As a journalist, if money or politics (e.g. The Insider) is driving the content of your news, you should be cricified. But by and large, the public seems to accept news-as-entertainment without so much as a blink. Oh well.
And speaking of old-school journalism, Katz, how about a little proof reading. For a fun game, find the place where the word "the" shouldn't be, in the above article.
sPh
There's a great source of anti-war articles, plus background information on American military involvement in the middle east and elsewhere at www.informationwar.org.