Links to recent articles, exciting news about an award, but first, on what changes and what stays the same….
The frequency with which we hear variants of “Everything changes and everything stays the same” is some evidence of its truth. Contexts vary but the words “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” so often ring true. The expression does not entail that nothing changes. It simply means that that there are deeper continuities underlying even the most apparently violently ruptures.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the rise of social media and the decline of traditional or “legacy” media. It seems to me that most of what is meant to be different about the new information ecosystem was always true of the old one.
Take three of the most common complaints about online life. First, it centres on identity, with everyone living in their tribal echo chambers. Second, and related, this has led to the decline of truth and evidence with emotion and gut feeling counting for more. Third, our attention spans have got ever shorter, resulting in less scrutiny and reflection, helping the spread of mis- and disinformation.
It sounds pretty dire but it also sounds a lot like Britain in the 1980s, when I first got immersed in news and media. Start with the tribal allegiances. Most people in the eighties read a newspaper and if you knew which one a person bought, you could predict their social class and political allegiance at more than 90% accuracy. (This stat is of course made up, but I bet it is more accurate than many of the numbers that appeared in old tabloid press.) If you were working class, you bought the Mirror if you were a hardcore Labour voter and the Sun if you persuadable to back the Tories who had allowed you to buy your council house. Middle class lefties read the Guardian, the most Tory read the Telegraph, while The Times appealed to less ideological conservatives. The Daily Mail was devoured by aspirational, first generation middle-class home owners, most of whom hadn’t been through higher education. Note that these are generalisations, not rules, so the existence of many exceptions doesn’t invalidate them. These newspapers were tribal echo chambers avant la lettre.
But still, you might protest, at least these newspapers had some kind of commitment to objective truth and rigorous reporting. Well, some did. But even those tended to go looking for the truths that would stir their readership, not ones that might make them uncomfortable. And misinformation was a huge part of their output. To this day many in Liverpool refuse to buy the Sun because it falsely blamed the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster on fans it called “thugs”. Old media knew how to push the emotional buttons of its readers, sometimes even more skilfully than algorithms now do.
As for short attention spans, tabloid newspapers featured huge headlines, big pictures and few words. The more serious papers devoted more column inches to stories, but they still do so online and in print today. The “long reads” that have become popular didn’t exist. No one sat through hours and hours of a box set and the average feature film lasted around 90 minutes compared to the standard two hours plus of today.
The fundamentals of how we get and process our news don’t seem to have changed very much at all. And yet it feels like it has changed a lot. I think this reflects an important truth about difference, and so also to change, which the example of cultural difference illustrates well.
One of the most important and enduring lessons I earned from writing How the World Thinks is that cultural difference are mostly to do with emphasis. As Tom Kasulis put it, what is background in one culture is foreground in another and vice-versa. So neat binaries are always misleading. For example, it is not that the West is individualistic and the East collectivist. After all, China celebrates its great individuals and the defining document of the US opens with the words “We the people…” But in general, eastern cultures foreground the importance of social relations and western ones foreground individual freedom and liberty.
These differences in emphasis have important effects, which is one reason why it feels very different to live in Beijing or New York. If background becomes foreground it can be like a gestalt shift, like the duck/rabbit illusion, in which the whole changes its appearance without any of its parts altering.
Applying this news, it seems to me that the online world has taken certain aspects of how we find and process information that were already strong but has changed the degree and manner in which they are emphasised.
Start with identity. Your old media tribe was transparent and probably self-conscious. People identified more with a social class and knew that people who read their newspaper were like them. Echo chambers, on the other hand, are often created without us choosing them, and sometimes without us noticing. A Guardian reader knew they were a Guardian reader, but there is no world for the kind of person whom the algorithms serve up the kind of content they do for each and every one of us.
When it comes to truth and emotion, I suspect that people have always been largely unaware of how much of what they belief is directed by their guts, not their heads. In the past, people were reassured that they were just being rational because what they read sounded well-argued and informed. Now reassurance comes from every meme or viral story citing facts and figures, often with links to their sources. Never mind that they are often dodgy – who has time to check? But the same was true of the sources in the partisan newspapers, which were much harder to verify anyway.
As for attention spans, I’m think the jury is still out. It seems indisputable that there are many more things jostling for our attention and the average amount of time we engage with any kind of “content” is shorter than in the days of reading newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio. But whether that means we have less capacity to focus when we do turn to longer forms, I just don’t know.
I am not denying that many things have changed, and some of these changes may be profound. All I am saying is that the most fundamental facts about how we get and process information haven’t changed at all. We have not suddenly become tribal, emotional and easily distracted. We always were and always will be. We need new ways to counter these flaws because they are being exploited in new ways. But no matter how well we try to design our information environment, we will always have to be on our guard against them. Each age shapes perennial human vices anew, and so each generation needs to find new paths to virtue.
News
My latest book, How the World Eats, has been shortlisted for the Guild of Food Writers Awards, in the “Food Book” category. There is a high-minded school of thought that says writers should be indifferent to awards. Of course, we should never believe that there is any direct correlation between quality and recognition, but being praised by your peers has got be some kind of validation. I find this nomination especially reassuring because the book has been very warmly but not widely received. I’ve had great feedback from those who have read it but sales have been a bit, well, meh. I will be in London to hide my disappointment and politely applaud the eventual winner on June 18, more than happy that I got so far.
This is only my second newsletter of the year and I’ve published a few things since the last one.
- I wrote a short piece about some of the key takeaways from my book How the World Eats for The Next Big Idea Club.
- A long article for Prospect focused on the divisions in the food and farming world as a case study for how polarisation in general works and how to overcome it.
- “Grasping Reality for the Crick Institute argues that neuroscience sheds light on how our everyday experiences work, but does not debunk them.
- I reviewed Stuart Gillespie’s excellent Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet for the Literary Review. It is behind a paywall but paid supporters can access it at my website.
- I also reviewed the fascinating Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember by Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy for the Wall Street Journal. For the same paper, I reviewed Beyond Stoicism, which is less impressive, but not without merit.
- I worked really hard to be thorough and fair in my article on “The Ethics of Boycotts” for The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors. Again it’s behind a payroll but paid supporters can read it here.
- Finally, I wrote a chapter for The Philosophy of Comedy, edited by Simon Kirchin, on “Comedy as Philosophy”, which paid supporters can read here.
There are no events coming up over the summer but several are being scheduled for the autumn. Watch this space.