6:00am | I heard a BBC World report last week concerning the belief by some in Sierra Leone that the Revolutionary United Front had felt encouraged to persist in carrying out amputations (one of their standard punishments during the decade-long civil war that has decimated the African nation) by BBC coverage of the story, noting that more amputations = more coverage/awareness = more aid funneled into the country—aid that inevitably benefited the RUF themselves. And so, it was asked: Has the BBC’s coverage of these atrocities furthered them, however indirectly?
That’s a question no one is comfortable asking—and some think should not be asked at all—because the thought that journalism could have such horrific unintended consequences, however blamelessly, is repugnant to the sensibilities of anyone interested First Amendment ideals like free speech and a free press1.
The point is, we’ve never been able fully to keep in view the ramifications of the dissemination of information. Quite simply, it’s too chaotic2. It always was, even before the invention of the printing press, never mind the Web. That’s why putting information—or ideas, or opinions—out there is all part of a ubiquitous ongoing experiment, of which we’re all a part and that nobody controls.
I’ve been ruminating on that experiment recently vis-à-vis this column, which I have always considered to be its own little sub-experiment in floating my thoughts out there—what I’m thinking about at the time, my take on this or that local going-on, etc.
By far the most consistent feedback I’ve gotten in person to any column I’ve written concerned my piece on The District Weekly and its demise—and that feedback was always along the lines of, “Gosh, sorry about those comments. People are mean/ridiculous/etc.”
I knew, of course, that some would not like the story being told and would say so, for the most part anonymously. But I accept that, because that’s part of the bigger experiment in the technological age. We all have more of a chance than ever to interact with each other, to make efforts to be heard, to pour our opinions (etc.) in the chaotic soup of informational admixing. The District was part of that experiment both in print and online; and in its wake one of its senior editors, Dave Wielenga, continues to take part with his Website Redistricted!3. The lbpost.com has embraced that experiment. John Greet, now a columnist, came to the publishers’ attention because he was such a diligent online commenter on the stories he read here and there. You can say here—or on Facebook, or on Twitter, or on YouTube, or [etc.]—how great or stupid Dave and John and I are. CNN (et al.) often read viewer Internet comments during broadcasts. So it goes.
The concept of ‘democratization’ is more apropos than ever. Within the last decade I began to hear the term bandied about rather often on the topic of filmmaking—that filmmaking had become democratized because it was no longer limited to those who had the wherewithal to purchase and learn to use traditional equipment—and since then it’s a term you hear applied to an ever-expanding list of fields.
While on the surface this seems like an absolute good—isn’t putting ever more in the hands of “the people” (demos (Gr.) = people) a good thing?—it raises auxiliary questions: Would it be better for only a professional class of journalists/authors/etc. to have the potential to speak to millions of people, or should any yahoo be able to ascend the same podium? Should it be so easy for us to engage in online conversation with each other while hiding behind a cybercloak of anonymity4?
I’m not sure that the answers to questions like these are consequential, because, like it or not, this is the state of information proliferation. The genie, as they say, is out of the bottle.
And so more than ever we, the people, are part of the democratic process. Because that process that is not merely voting and governance; those are not points of arrival but milestones along the way, tourism and topography on this journey sans destination. And so my election-night wish is not limited to those whom we put in office: it concerns all of us. For we are in a better position to hear each other than were any of the people who preceded us in human history. And so I wish for all of us to listen as reflectively as we can5, because that is one of our best opportunities to be better, as individuals and as a community.
Footnotes
1 I’m damn interested in these ideals—but I’ve never met a question I didn’t like.
2 I.e., in the sense of chaos theory
3 Full disclosure: I write theatre review for Redistricted!.
4 While finishing up this column, I happened to see this comment on a recent LBPost story concerning Tom Dean’s arrest: “[L]et’s make sure that comments remain tasteful. […] Anonymity can make people be a little bit more vitriolic than they would be under different circumstances.”
5 It’s worth emphasizing ‘reflectively,’ especially as concerns the Web, because in cyberspace all too often we read less reflectively (the “surfing” metaphor is apropos, as surfing is something one does on the surface of the water) than we would (e.g.) a newspaper. Thus I wasn’t all that surprised when one reader/commenter on my last column misunderstood me to say that I believed Bob Foster and Robert Garcia don’t really want what’s best for Long Beach, even though more than once I made explicit statements to the contrary.