No
matter where one goes in modern technological society, it is hard to escape the
news. People are reading newspapers and
magazines in some form, whether hard copy or online. People are listening to the news on the radio
and they are watching the news on television, sometimes all day on CNN, MSNBC,
and Fox. People get news from websites
on the Internet and from social media like Facebook and Twitter. And, of course, people exchange news with
each other as a kind of gossip.
In
the old days, people also got news through gossip as well as through letters. Formal
announcements have frequently been made by town criers in communities
throughout the world. However, learning
about other people’s events and experiences did not occupy such a large chunk
of one’s time the way that it does today.
As life has become more frictionless and more mediated, more passive and
more reactive, people are becoming number and number. Not enough of any significance happens to
them to form the foundation of a meaningful life narrative and to stimulate
them fully to life, to make and preserve organic imprints and to prepare for
death with a surrogate immortality. News
allows people to experience meaningful life events vicariously, to feel, in
many cases, the abrasive friction that comes from other people’s important life
events. And it allows people to
experience important life events without taking the abrasive roles of putting
themselves in danger or in an embarrassing situation.
Now
as people have become numb to organic stimulation, they continue to respond to
the mechanical and digital stimulation of modern machines. Although they are no longer able to fully
absorb the flowing, blendable, continual stimuli from organic, natural and
traditional sources, they have been reconfigured to respond to the defined
discrete stimuli of all the machines that they use in daily life. The defined discrete modalities of news
items, factoids, and data are ways that people can still absorb life events and
experiences as a result of their having been psychologically reconfigured from
the mirroring and modeling generated by modern technological entities. These
vicarious events and experiences are somehow absorbed to become a part of the
news gatherer’s own life. People talk
about news items with one another as if they had participated themselves
directly in the news event or news experience.
This
merging with the people involved in the news-based event or experience works in
democracies and authoritarian governments in different ways. In a democracy, the merging with important
news figures is based on the notion that any citizen of a certain age has the
right to run for office in government or to work and study in such a way that
he can do something significant in business, law, the arts or the sciences, or
any other area of life that could potentially create the opportunity for
newsworthy events or experiences. In a country
with an authoritarian government , there are certainly ceilings as to how far an
average person can climb in government.
To the extent there is intense political and economic inequality in such
a society, there frequently can be limitations for many if not most people as
to how far they can climb on the ladder of success. In such cases, the newsmakers provide
examples for those ambitious people at the bottom of the ladder. Examples of people who can help guide any
person who wishes to at least dream of being one of the important newsmakers. In authoritarian societies, the people with
power provide primarily opportunities for the average person to identify and
dream, to participate in a collective surrogate immortality with all the other
average people who identify and dream.
In many ways, the powerful people hold power that make them almost like
human gods.
This
is a little different from democracies, where the newsmakers act as examples
for people who believe they have the capacity to be their own newsmakers. So that the identification and dreaming with
the newsmakers is more fragile and more shallow. It is more contingent. People identify and dream with the
contingency that it occurs only until they can potentially replace the
newsmakers themselves.
But
the conduit to the newsmakers is the bits of news, the factoids and data that
surround them. Now Trump is very
interesting because he is an authoritarian president trying to navigate his
policies in a country that is still a democracy. For his supporters, he is a classic example
of a person who serves as a vehicle for the formation of a collective surrogate
immortality. His supporters look up to
him and would never dream of rising to his unique level of power. For his opponents, they challenge him as if he
is an ordinary but deranged person operating on an attainable level. And both groups receive affirmation of their
points of view from the news sources that back their position. Fox for the supporters; MSNBC and CNN for the
opponents. In other words, what we call
the factoids or data or bits of news are, particularly in today’s world,
influenced by the flowing blendable continual beliefs of the news stations that
present them. This gives the impact of
the presentation of news an extra kick to it.
And it acts as a tool by which people can pull themselves out of their
growing numbness.
News
today becomes a kind of addiction. Some
people stay glued to their 24 hour news stations or go from one news website to
the next. It becomes a means by which
they can avoid the reality that they have very tenuous vacuum lives in their
primary experience external worlds. News
becomes a means by which they can use emotion-arousing factoids and data to
feel alive.
(c) 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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