"I Read Where I Am. Exploring New Information Cultures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Various)

2. Better Stories – Henk Blanken

When man began to speak, around fifty thousand years ago, the earth was already billions of years old. That the word was ‘in the beginning’ is exaggerated, but yet: man became man when he started stammering and passing on his history not purely via his genes but as stories. It is our stories that distinguish us from other animals.

Stories help us forward. That went faster thanks to writing and printing, and then we discovered science and finally, as an afterthought, journalism, which began to tell stories as they were taking place.

The word has always been in power, and the power has always had the word. Journalists keep tabs on that power. Things were better when ‘the press’ was able to reach more people. At the end of last century, journalism was stronger and more powerful than ever. And there you have mediacracy.

And then things went downhill with the word. Mass media is the product of an industrialized century, just like mass consumption and mass marketing. But at the end of last century, the mass began to crumble. Rather than a silent majority, we wanted to become assertive individuals.

Thanks to Internet, just as radical as those first stammerings, we could say what we wanted. The paradigm of the mass media – press talks, masses listen – is replaced by something else: we all talk, albeit in small groups. Not the masses but the group – the clan – is the measure of the Internet.

Us and our 287 friends. The word is subject to inflation. The decline in reading has little to do with that. It is a normative term. The hours we spend reading on the Internet do not appear in the statistics. Apparently, there is a difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ words, just as there is between high and low culture. That perhaps explains why we complain about the decline in reading and at the same time worry about information overload.

Is it really so bad if we read fewer ‘high’ words, less ‘crime and punishment’ and more twitter feeds? If we lose our ability for ‘deep reading’? Or will that be replaced by associative digital network reading, via tags and ‘likes’ and links, supported by video, or an instant translation from the Arabic, which is a mess but good enough?

I hesitate. Journalists must live with the inflation of the word. And the word, just like the masses, is falling apart. The inflation of the word is the inflation of the power – and of journalism.

What saves journalists is the story. Not necessarily their story. Or that of their antagonists, the politicians. Stories originate in networks, and are not told by the masses, but by small clans. Perhaps society will eventually have enough with these new stories, but I wouldn’t want to bet democracy on it.

But journalists will have to tell better stories and tell those stories better than ever. There’s more than enough shallow news. Even stories with a head and tail, heroes and scoundrels, sweat and tears are no longer scarce. But the need for stories that tell what we share and do wrong, how we suffer and love, is as old as mankind.

Henk Blanken is a journalist and writer of books on digital culture and new media.