The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we're in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what's happening to us now: today's media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It's a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds - completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it's going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we're concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there's panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we're going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we've relied on for so many years.
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Not sure that his analogy helps much... We're basically returning to an earlier setup where the real reporters were independent contractors (stringers) who had separate contracts with AP, UP, CBS, etc. John Gunther's novel 'The Lost City' gives an excellent insider's perspective on this system. The "owned" reporters, the permanent employees of the NYTimes or Herald Tribune, would come into a place like Vienna or Budapest and talk to the stringers. Not all that different from Johnson's idea of "all the news fit to link."
Also, Johnson is mainly talking about the kind of raw data needed by insiders, not the overview needed by ordinary citizens. Our present setup does a good job on raw data, but we don't have any real equivalent of a Lowell Thomas or H.V. Kaltenborn ... men of *broad general knowledge* and common sense who could personally filter out the crap in the raw data.
"McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem."
McLuhan talked about much more than that; he and Neil Postman coined the metaphor "media ecology" back in the sisties, and Postman's book and essays from the last 40+ years have explored media from a "media as ecosystem" perspective and inspired the creation of the Media Ecology Association.
What Postman and like-minded media ecologists feared was that our media ecosystem would essentially become a media jungle choked with trivial, brain-wasting amusements, something like a plague of digital kudzu and other invasive parasites choking out the beneficial vegetation/culture.
I think Johnson is right to worry about the health of the news gathering and disseminating ecosystem, as it has clearly failed us in major ways. From what I've read of Johnson's other work in praise of video games, I'm not sure he really understands the larger implications of the media ecology metaphor.
When my father was a wee lad in the 1930s, Lowell Thomas occupied an office across the hall from my grandfather's office. My father was extremely impressed by Thomas, a very nice and entertaining man with a powerful voice who on several occasions took him down to the automat for pie.
Now consider this. My grandfather's office wasn't at located at NBC radio. It was at the Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) in Philadelphia. One of the most respected journalists of his day -- one "filtering out the crap" for the masses -- was more or less the high-profile employee of an oil company. The implications seem a whole lot darker now than they did then.
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