It has often been said that newspapers are a casualty of the digital revolution. I disagree. As more people tweet through grapevines and feed cyberspace with minute-by-minute status updates, I feel a tested adage coming on: “It’s a jungle out there.” The time we spend online hasn’t changed the quality of what we see, or much less what we read.
Has our digital millennium revolutionized the way we think, act, protect our intimacy when someone is “following you” 24/7 on Twitter and rummaging through your Facebook friends? Or are our information safe havens – worth billions – a pretext to prove to governments that we really do exist. Facebook isn’t about making friends (in fact, how many friends can one count on Facebook?). It’s about passing through virtual immigration 20 times a day, where every bit of your digital footprint is mapped and safely stored, somewhere in Nevada.
While we cast our nets in a sea of social networks and scroll through the lives of friends and the recently de-friended, the web appears a messy place. We have mapped the world, the galaxies and our endangered oceans. And as Google Earth-inspired Galileos what have we seen? As we observe with a bird’s eye view the terraces of Kensington and citadels of Rajhesthan, we are prevented from looking beyond. A quick “zoom” and the balconies with daffodils become a myriad of pixels. A bustling Indian market with its daunting chaos is captured as a geostationary nicety.
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With Internet we have gained more vantage points, but are shielded from the grit, the experience of being there. We are more connected than ever, but live lonelier lives. Big data rules us because we crave Internet’s irony.
The more we search for good content online the more we blame print. Because we have grown so used to it, it’s not meant to work. The same happens with print advertising. If it’s working, there’s an instinctive urge to challenge the business model. Think MBA. Today, it’s no longer enough. Now, you need Executive MBA. In five years, you’ll earn Executive Platinum MBA (With Priority Access assured). If you go “viral” before your degree, you won’t have to work at all. This is what happens to newspapers. They are not dying. They are just being reinvented to death.
Ten years ago citizen journalists set out to save news. As the Citizen Kanes of new media they braved the world with iPhones. Now that hourly car bomb in Baghdad flashes across our mobile devices. Over breakfast we can Skype with snipers in Aleppo, tag them on Foursquare, syndicate through Pinterest, tweet our stalkers and digitally-enhance a very misunderstood revolution on Instagram. With so many dead and wounded, did we change anything?
We are pushing hard for protagonism in cyberspace; and far too often with little regard for copyright protection and the investigative journalism characteristic of print. We are surrounded by wholesale content. This is the casualty of all news. Not the casualty of newspapers. Good journalism proves that if we strive towards writing well, using images ethically, the future of print is secure. It’s about the messenger, not the medium. But I love the intimacy of paper and I’m not a touchy-feely person.
