Adrian Chen writes an interesting article for The New Yorker which touches on a couple of concerns of mine WRT the Web that long time readers will recognize: issues of accuracy and honesty, along with questions of gatekeeping. He brings in a comparison with the early days of radio, which has its problems since being an author on radio requires access to some fairly expensive technology, even on a pro rata basis, while Web authoring access costs have come down to almost nothing; but the comparison is interesting regardless. This really caught my eye:
The various efforts to fact-check and label and blacklist and sort all the world’s information bring to mind a quote, which appears in David Goodman’s book, from John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker: “Men don’t live by bread alone, nor by fact alone.” In the nineteen-forties, Grierson was on an F.C.C. panel that had been convened to determine how best to encourage a democratic radio, and he was frustrated by a draft report that reflected his fellow-panelists’ obsession with filling the airwaves with rationality and fact. Grierson said, “Much of this entertainment is the folk stuff . . . of our technological time; the patterns of observation, of humor, of fancy, which make a technological society a human society.”
Facts alone are only compelling to those who understand the context; for those who don’t, story is the necessary provision of context in an understandable manner.
False stories serve the desires of malicious, selfish folks, and in an ideal world, gatekeepers keep them out. When television and radio were dominant, the gatekeepers were small in number and effective. However, were they neutral with regards to true narratives with which they disagreed? Chen notes:
In 1961, a watershed moment occurred with the leak of a memo from labor leaders to the Kennedy Administration which suggested using the Fairness Doctrine to suppress right-wing viewpoints. To many conservatives, the memo proved the existence of the vast conspiracy they had long suspected. A fund-raising letter for a prominent conservative radio show railed against the doctrine, calling it “the most dastardly collateral attack on freedom of speech in the history of the country.” Thus was born the character of the persecuted truthteller standing up to a tyrannical government—a trope on which a billion-dollar conservative-media juggernaut has been built.
Thus the sense of grievance on which the conservative movement has been built. Now we have Trump lying like it’s drinking water.
It’s a good article to read.
