“Life’s but a walking shadow…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing…”
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

by Glynn Wilson
The Big Picture

Do you ever feel the pressure of change in your life?

Do you ever get the feeling that new technology is coming on so fast you can’t keep up?

Do you ever get the feeling that there’s too much information in the world, but that not enough of it is getting into the minds of some of the people you know who need it the most?

If so, you are not alone.

We are living in a time of great technological change, greater than at any time in human history. Feelings of stress and anxiety are inevitable, unless you are just determined to use an analogue phone and avoid cell phones, avoid digital cable or satellite TV, to read an old fashioned daily or weekly newspaper instead of getting your news online.

If you are reading this, you are already taking at least one step into the future. If you know someone who refuses to read on the Web, consider printing this out for them. I am about to tell you something that will help you understand and deal with it all.

The only way I know how to do that is to tell some stories. And the only way I know how to tell a story that informs is to put myself into the story. That is “new journalism,” whether the people who still cling to the corporate PR style of detached newspaper journalism are ready for it or not.

For anyone who has ever taken a college-level class in English literature, you should have already been introduced to the concept of change written about by poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But perhaps your professor didn’t fully enlighten you on that, or maybe you have just forgotten.

The changes they were writing about 237 years ago were truly revolutionary, but nothing compared to now. They lamented the coming industrial revolution with its water and air pollution. They struggled to understand how the masses of serfs in Europe were “not going to take it anymore” and throwing kings, queens, princes and princesses out of their palaces and demanding equal rights and more of a share in the economy.

Cries of “socialism” and similar anti-change messages filled the pamphlets of the time, although the messages were much slower to reach the people then. It should go without saying, but they did not have TV or the Internet or even Rush Limbaugh to turn to on the radio to feed their loathing of change.

In America, they had the writings of Thomas Paine, however, who was anything but an “objective” journalist in today’s sense, although he was quite empirical in his analysis of the times and what was needed in the way of a new type of government.

I’m sure he felt caught in between two currents of history in his time, just as I feel caught in between two audiences here today. After four and a half years of publishing this Website, I am doing my best to reflect on the big picture here and not just focus on the fast-breaking details of daily news.

One of the ways I do that is to periodically document my own path in dealing with new technologies. Contrary to what you may think, I too have had my moments resisting new technologies. I never wanted a cell phone, for example, until 2002, when it became an essential piece of equipment to cover news from the road.

I was among the first generation of reporters trained on computers in the early 1980s, however, so I have never written a news story on a pad with a pen. There are a few writers around who still work that way, though, including E.O. Wilson at Harvard, at least according to an interview I did with him a few years back. He has a secretary who types his manuscripts.

I never worked for a newspaper that used “hot type,” since offset printing had already taken over the newspaper business when I first got into it nearly 30 years ago. But when I went to grad school in the mid-1990s, I embraced the Internet as fast as possible and started publishing on the Web. It seems almost like an eternity, but I published my first Website 14 years ago.

In those days, there were still many journalism professors who did not see the future potential of the Web. They said it was “a fad” that would fade in popularity like the Yo-Yo or the Hula Hoop.

Boy were they wrong.

Even as recently as a couple of years ago, there were newspaper publishers still holding out hope that the fad thing was true. This week, the publisher of The Birmingham News decided to give up and quit, most likely because he has no clue or even a desire to try and figure out how to master the Web. Oh, they will say he did it to spend more time with his family, like every failed politician who decided to go back to the ranch.

The fact is the Bush recession hit newspapers like a couple of tons of bricks. Even though the writing had been on the Facebook wall for some time already, they refused to believe — or to adequately prepare. Sure they put up a Website, but it was half-hearted at best.

In recent months, they have totally caved into the “blog thang,” turning their newspaper Website into a series of blogs, which are really not blogs at all. They mistake the term blog for another fad they have to jump on, when their style of reporting and writing has not changed one whit.

A blog is not just a new way of publishing a news story. As anyone who delves into the history of publishing knows, the technology itself changes the style of what is published. In the 15th century, the printing press dramatically changed things from the days when scribes spent their time copying everything over and over again. In the 19th century, the steam engine changed things again. In the 20th century, it was the internal combustion engine and then the offset press, followed closely by the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Go back sometime in a special collections archive library and read stories from the different eras. The means of printing was not the only thing that changed. The kinds of things that were printed and the writing style itself changed.

Journalism historians and copyright lawyers are still clinging to some form of ink and paper publication as a definition of “the press,” even as our rights of a free press in a democratic society are being challenged on many fronts. Democracy cannot work without a free press. That’s a fact.

But the owners of the printing presses have not been particularly concerned about democracy for some time. And that is a big part of the problem we face today.

Over the past three decades, the United States has changed from an upwardly mobile country with a growing middle class and rising education levels to a country that is doing its best to reel back into the past. We are a people in denial of the inevitable changes that lie ahead. Oh, I’m not talking about my fans in New York and Washington and Portland, Oregon, but people I run into every day in the place I like to call Alabamaland.

Many of the people of my home state are just now getting into computers and learning to send e-mail, although a growing number are signing up for social networking programs such as Facebook. But I can tell by their reactions to certain types of communication that they missed out on all the developments in technology in the 1990s, so they are reacting to e-mail messages and in Facebook comments in the same negative ways those of us at research universities did more than a decade ago.

My dilemma, and I feel it almost every day, is how to reach out and communicate with the sophisticated audience who has ridden the technological wave for years, versus those who are just now trying to learn and deal with it.

As an example of how things have changed just in the past decade, as a communications scholar working on a Ph.D. nine years ago, I was literally still expected to read virtually everything published in the area of media effects research and summarize that in a “comprehensive” bibliography.

No one in a communications grad program is expected to do that now. They finally realized it is impossible. They now write dissertations on blogging, which is such a new technology there is no great body of literature on it anyway.

To fully understand what I mean, think of Thomas Jefferson and the founders of this country. They were truly “Renaissance men” who had read everything that had been published on philosophy and governance, architecture and agriculture. There is no Ph.D. in philosophy or agriculture from Harvard or Auburn who can say that today. There is too much information out there to read it all, even over the course of a lifetime — even lengthened by modern medicine.

It is incredibly difficult to communicate with an audience on so many different education levels and with limited shared experiences. Even as recently as 40 years ago, when man landed for the first time on the moon, most of the people in this country watched that on one of three television networks. Now there are too many channels and too many blogs for people to have a conversation based on about the same level of understanding.

The good news is you don’t have to read it all. You don’t have to fully embrace every new technology. You can pick and choose and, with the miracle of Google and Wikipedia, you can catch up at your own pace. I have only been on Facebook for a few months, but I see the possibility for it to connect people in interesting ways. But you cannot just rely on one technology to do it all for you. The information you get is limited by the friends you make.

There’s no need to shoot the messenger. He’s just trying to help…

One last thought about the human condition. We have always looked for a savior to rescue us from sin and change. Jesus may be the most popular, perhaps because he promised not a better life on earth, which must have seemed impossible 2,000 years ago, but a better life after death.

People still cling to the idea, and according to the Constitution, they have every right to believe. But that does not make it true.

Let me suggest a better hero: Shelley’s Prometheus.

In Prometheus Unbound there is a fiercely revolutionary text championing free will, goodness, hope and idealism in the face of oppression. The Epilogue, spoken by Demogorgon, expresses Shelley’s tenets as a poet and as a revolutionary. It seems to ring true today like no blogger who has emerged to date.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

These poor people do not get it yet — and probably never will. Dog help them every one…

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Tags: Technology U: Prometheus Unbound

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Connecting the Dots, Glynn Wilson, LocustFork.Net, Opinion, Technology News, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.