Warp Speed Journalism
Mike Madias |
ABSTRACT
Industrial age journalism is all but dead. But the written word and
the essay thrive. Paradoxically, pre-industrial forms of journalism are
also the new "warp speed" journalism. Industrial culture lives in Euclidian space and follows Newtonian mechanics. It is an effort to irradiate chaos and produce predictable uniformity of product.
But the wired generation lives in non-Euclidian space/time, quantum
mechanics and Einsteinian possibility.
All the other poor bastards of less fortunate generations are locked up
in locations, events, and identities. They, who think of themselves as
"they," ask Who? What? Where? and Why? As a means of orienting themselves in a
reality matrix. "They" will not understand what I am saying here. Even some people who
use
the World Wide Web on a daily basis may not fully get it.
But there are those of us who know the god, Unix, and can prey using
command line mantras. And there are Windows jockeys who can snap a mouse with
speed and grace, like a flamenco dancer plays the castanets. We are the
witches and warlocks of the postmodern age.
When we tell our stories, we use the tools of the bardic poets, and
despite the use of ancient story, fable, and myth making forms, we are the warp
speed journalists.
PART ONE - Whooo? Asked the hookah smoking caterpillar. Whoooo are
you?
The advent of the age of telecommunications requires a rethinking of
our
concepts of time and space.
One cannot think exactly like a refrigerator repair person and untangle a
crashed computer system or network. The "trouble shooting" and the
debug
process are similar. A computer systems analyst could probably get a
refrigerator up and running, eventually. But a refrigerator technician
would
have less luck with the computer network. Systems analysts see
themselves
as wizards or gurus. They deal in chaos and uncertainty. They are
outside
the constraints of space and time, and it seems that they are working
magic.
The warp speed journalist does the same. And often the language and
concepts of decades old science fiction classics provide useful
vocabularies.
The following is a useful vocabulary, an analogy, much like the "men
of
silver and gold" mythic analogy
used by Plato in the Republic, used to convey his complex set of ideas
on
government and education.
Now there are hyper-space mathematicians and physicists working on
Einstein's unfinished work of deriving a unified field theory. Some of
them
posit a 14-dimension physical universe.
This essay is not trying to do that. All it is doing is constructing a
useful fiction, a simplifying model of human experience.
We experience our lives as if we and everything else in creation
(including
deities) exist in a multiple dimension universe, with dimensions of
space,
time and also of consciousness and identity. These correspond loosely
with the fundamental journalistic questions: Where? When? Who? What? And
additional questions about a chain of causally: How? And Why?
Journalistic storytelling must match the way readers experience life
in order to inform them.
It is easy to consider a four dimensional universe with three axis x, y,
and z
of space and t of time.
Robert Heinlein, science fiction writer and futurist, posited a five-dimension universe as early as 1941 in a story titled "Elsewhen."
Throughout his career he returned to the topic of how we experience
time and
space. For the sake of understanding journalism, we
can add to the dimensions of time the multiple dimensions of
consciousness
of and identity. Consciousness is just a way of experiencing the
universe
like mass and location.
There can be a number of different ways that space, time, and identity
are
experienced. Yet most people believe that their way is the only
"reality."
Those who experience it differently are barbarians, fools, or are
mentally ill.
Here is a story to illustrate the point. It is a parable that might be
true or not about the famous anthropologist, Margaret Mead, and a gentleman
from Samoa.
When Margaret Mead went to Samoa in the late 1920s, she might have
discovered that Samoans experienced time
differently than Mead. Watches were important in Mead's experience,
but may have been useless in Samoa. The key question an anthropologist would
ask is, "When does the present become the past?" In Western culture the
process is instantaneous, of course. But to a Samoan,
the present may remain and linger for a while. The Samoans may
experience chunks of what we would call "the past" as persisting in the Samoan
present.
It may take
a ritual, or a sunset, or the birth of a child to have the experience
of "now" become the experience of "then."
So it becomes useful to consider the experience of time to be a
cultural matter. So, Mead and the Samoan share approximately the same
coordinates of space, a hut on Samoa. They might live in different coordinates if
time, that is different "nows."
Further, when Margaret Mead looked at a Samoan, she was conscious of
being who she was. The Samoan knew who he was. To Mead, the Samoan was an
interesting man. To the Samoan, Mead might have been a potential
afternoon's sexual dalliance; or she might have been a nutritious
snack.
Suppose the prevalent Samoan religion in the 1920s was a nature-oriented
pantheism. Mead might have certainty that she was not the Samoan. But
the Samoan might have seen Mead as part of himself.
A police officer on the street sees something or someone she identifies as
"suspicious." An urban kid sees a cop and identifies the officer as
"threatening." Clearly,
this is a common situation: same place, same time, but
different consciousness. And the consequences of this collision of
consciousness may be a matter of life and/or death. It is different
matrices of space, time and identity in collision and competition.
Location is also variable. Where is here? It is a point with three
coordinates in a Cartesian coordinate
space. Does here occupy one cubic inch? Is the one next to it there?
When here is Hiroshima or Nagasaki, how large is here? What duration does
here have? How long before here is there, or perhaps more frighteningly,
before there is here?
For there to be a here and a there, there must be a communication
emanating from someplace and received someplace else. The emanation is going
from here and arriving there. This is seemingly very elementary in
Euclidian space/time.
But, in our epoch, the one of warp speed journalism, there is something
called Amazon dot com and it has a discrete location. Amazon dot com
is where it is and is no place else. It is not at Amazing corn cob. But
where is Amazon dot com? There is a corporation called Amazon.com
Incorporated. It has headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Its stock sells for between
70 and 100 a share. So it has material existence and measurable
material value. Its value does not derive from profit. It is losing
money.
Its value is that it is everywhere.
Now "Coca Cola is everywhere" means that in that to a greater or lesser
degree one can buy a Coke anywhere, but Amazon dot com is anywhere
there is a computer an a phone connection. "Coke is everywhere" is a metaphor.
"Amazon dot com is everywhere" is an empirically measurable
proposition.
The Internet gives anyone an opportunity to participate in world
building as
if it were a parade of the living dead. In one web persona I am Jack
Kerouac returned. In another I am my lover. In a third, I am Mike
Wallace chasing a story and a confession for a virtual television news
magazine. Some place else, I am an old French whore.
The point is that space, time and identity (or
consciousness) are experienced as free variables, not as semi fixed
variables on linear continuities.
Postmodern mobility means that someone or
something, need not be fixed at a location, an event, or an identity.
As a consequence there is the Internet, where hundreds of thousands
realities collide and compete in cultural warfare. On television Coke
may battle Pepsi, or Leno may compete with Letterman. But on the Internet,
Coke competes with Pepsi; the Department of tourism in Nova Scotia; WWF
wrestling; hot college age girls who are eager to please; Serbia;
Mickey Mouse; a poker game being held at an off shore casino; Brittany Spears;
and skinhead Neo-Nazis.
Each element on the net has its own peculiarities of space, time and
identity. The holiest of holies and the place where the dogs do it are
only a mouse click apart. And despite all government intervention, it
cannot be controlled or stopped. The Internet is bigger than government.
Given this demonstrable model, a raging cultural war, what is the role
of the twenty-first century journalist? Who resigned and passed the
mantle of god hood onto him?
PART TWO - "It's your great grandfather's bicycle and not your father's
Oldsmobile"
The Internet age does not require a new kind of journalism. Warp Speed
journalism is not some kind of wiz bang style of writing. It is the
kind of journalism that has always flourished at times of rapid change and
transition.
One such time was in 14th century Venice. Marco Polo had returned and
started writing about his experiences in China in the court of Kublae
Khan. Polo was a correspondent, who wrote what this strange and wondrous
place, the Orient, was like.
As journalism developed into books, magazines and
newspapers, so did the correspondent piece, "The letter from India,"
where authors went to an exotic or dangerous places and wrote about
their
adventures became popular. This developed into travel journalism, and
when
done in a academic setting, became anthropological studies like those of
Margaret Mead in Samoa.
Another type of correspondent went off to war and
wrote letters from the front to publications.
This was the prevalent style of journalism until the late 19th century
when the lone correspondent was replaced by the wire service. The
Associated Press wrote the stories in the field and wired them back to newspapers
around the country. At this time, each newspaper had its own
viewpoint, its own way of dealing with space, time and particularly identity.
This was manifest in the political positions the publication took.
In order to sell the same text to many newspapers all around the
country, several conventions of journalism had to be established. The AP story
was generally not written by someone who was a participant observer; it was
written by a reporter. This person would find people who either witnessed
or could comment on a news event. The reporter would ask spokespeople
what they saw or thought. The reporter's job was to remain
objective and to present balanced reporting. If one side said that
shoddy construction had caused the mine disaster, but management said that it
was an act of God, the reporter, being objective, reported both sides. Journalism schools
made it a virtue to report on equal basis the statements of the saints and
scoundrels, and let the readers decide.
The myth was fostered that there are two sides to every story, and that
Democracy required all sides to have their say. There may be and
usually are many interpretations to a set of facts, but AP journalism applied
the standards of objectivity to matters of fact, not just interpretation.
There were times when reporters were eye witness to the event and had
their own viewpoint on what happened. The wanted to tell the story from
their own viewpoint; that is, be a correspondent not a reporter. The AP frowns on
this. They want a story that will play inoffensively anywhere.
A distinction was made between the objective and balanced reporting on
the news pages of a paper and the opinionated material on the editorial and
op-ed pages. AP journalism is a method of doing research and
reporting news events. Theoretically anyone who knows AP research
methodology and grammatical conventions could go and report on the same event and produce almost identical rendering
of it. And these dispatches would go by teletype to newspapers around
the world.
There were still travel reporters, there were still war correspondents.
Still letters form India. But most journalism was bland, boring and
approximately 50% bogus.
The warp speed or gonzo journalist is a corespondent journalist. But
correspondent journalism has been so completely replaced by the
industrial Associated Press model of journalism that it seems that gonzo
journalism is new and radical.
Further, the journalist first associated with the word "gonzo" is
Hunter S.
Thompson. And he brings in an association with taking drugs. Getting
blasted was certainly a part of his stories.
But to say that drinking a bottle of tequila and then covering a story
makes you gonzo, is not necessarily true. It depends on the story.
In this time of globalization, cultural wars, and the nullification of
space, time, and identity, the story to be told is not an event with a
who, what, where and when. The story to be told is that there are scenes
that share this culture sphere, and that they are strange and wondrous.
The point is to tell readers who may be laboring under the illusion
that they are privy to the one and only really real reality, that maybe they
might not be. After all, these other people figure that they have the
word of reality straight from God's lips and they dance around with rattle
snakes every Sunday. If they were wrong, God would have a rattler strike dead
the minister's lovely 14 year old daughter.
Oh Yeah?, say the fire walkers; the Roman Catholics; the reform Jews.
The world, especially the Internet driven world is certainly worthy
of provoking thought. It is something to think about at least. The gonzo
correspondent journalists break the Associated Press mold, as they seek
to provoke thought in readers.