Monday December 2, 2019 ~ NATIONAL
by Mary P Brooke ~ West Shore Voice NewsI
Social media exhaustion is hopefully just around the corner, ushering in a new phase of integration of how people get their news.
Comparing the ‘starting point’ at the beginning of this decade when the idea of newspapers still mattered first to most readers, through a transition to ‘everyone a publisher’ with their own Facebook page (addressed mostly at their own followers), Twitter stream (with the odd expectation that ‘everyone’ would see every post), and peaking with the apparent popularity of Instagram (flash-in-the-pan photos, kind of like a party so wild that no one remembers any details the next day), we are stumbling forward into a phase where there’s a full menu… news portals, email, Twitter, Facebook, ‘wherever you get your podcasts’, and more.
What’s the point of the overload? Eventually people simplify, it’s a necessary step to making a fresh choice. Unless you really do want to be plugged-in 24/7, a menu of news from TV and print/PDF, combined with a pared back list of ‘must see’ web portals, Twitter feeds and some key Facebook posts, is probably the way to move forward as an informed member of the community with still room to breathe.
It’s a fabulous social gesture that people ‘Like’, ‘Love’, or post a ‘Sad Face’ every life experience that people divulge to the world on Facebook, and if that’s what you’re online for, that’s cool (although completely and unabashedly non-private). Putting one’s life minutia out to the world is a way of saying “I’m here” in an increasingly structured social system. Now it’s in the cloud database forever, you realize.
But for news, there is a proven track of professional journalism which has actually improved in Canada in the last year or two, as the starry-eyed fascination of digital trinket technology loses its punch and people (both producers and consumers of news) realize that to stay informed requires attention to real journalism from reliable sources.
Not to get too nerdy on you here, but journalism is the work and art of ‘writing history as it happens’, and there is no higher calling in the cauldron of creating content for the human record.
~ MPB
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This editorial was first published on page 2 in the November 29, 2019 print-PDF weekend edition of West Shore Voice News.