The greatest casualty of the Information Age is journalism and journalists — because we don’t need the “interpreters,” but the world’s foremost experts on their subject matter are capable of transmitting their information directly to people capable of understanding.
Not everybody will be receptive to great insights and understanding — which is the first task of communications — identifying the proper audience, and not just (broad-)casting pearls before swine, thinking that is an intelligent thing to do.
That’s the first task in effective communications — and not simply ranting to the world, thinking one’s message will be heard and understood by the proper recipients of that message. There are thousands of people broadcasting their messages on the street corners of the world everyday — and nobody is listening to them either.
And that is the problem of what the random, broadcast message has become in today’s world of communications and information — in which, the first thing done, is to identify the right audience for that information — rather than demanding the acknowledgment of their superiority of understanding that enables them to reduce the complicated to a simpler form.
Instead, most journalists make a simple matter complicated, to prove the superiority of their understanding — which is the ONLY thing they are communicating anymore, and why they are turning people off (and vice-versa).
I’m thinking about the mundane, “what happened” type of journalism. It’s not an expert issue, it’s an issue of someone having the job of finding out “what happened”, figuring out if “what happened” is related to other things that did or did not happen, and presenting that without bias in a way we can understand.
Plus, we need objective arbiters of the truth. I know we conservatives are sure we have the truth on our side, and the liberals seem to feel the same way. But truth isn’t a pliable commodity, and our country will not survive if we have two sets of truth coming from two sets of sources. If we can’t get the truth in common, we can’t do anything.
We need an unbiased media to filter out the fiction from the fact. We get too much of a “he-said/she-said”, “two-side” to the story today. No matter how stupid the idea, the talk shows can present one person for each side, making it look like genuine competing stories.
This is why more people today seem to firmly believe the truth of things that are absurdly false, even conservatives fall for it. Because we are NOT smart enough to be able to tell who can be trusted, and who can’t, we don’t have the time to thoroughly research a story, or the money to do it right, or the access we need to get all the details.
The internet provides easy access, but that’s only part — it’s WHAT we have easy access to that’s important.
Sure, if there is a film of something, we don’t need someone to tell us what we are looking at. But most of the time we need someone to do the grunt work and collect the facts on the ground, so we can use OUR time deciding what those facts MEAN.