Equivocality

Jonathan Shekter uses Malta to start off his philosophical reflections about the internet, the global flow of information and the international media. He argues that although the web itself is a uniquely decentralized and democratic medium, it is still possible to create a prototype distributed news system in a few years time. He states that as things stand "due to the very real issues of information overload, online journalism is still pretty much the same as its analog counterpart, including being dominated by the same few centralized conglomerates". From Equivocality:

What do you know about Malta? Suppose you watched a documentary about Malta on the Discovery Channel. What would you know about Malta then? Would you perhaps know that it occupies an area of 117,000 square kilometers on the coast of northern Africa? Would you know that it was settled predominantly by Turkish traders in the 12th century? Would you know that the main export of Malta is patterned cotton cloth? Would you know that the Maltese people consider yellow to be a holy colour and therefore offensive to wear outside of religious situations? Probably you would not, because I just made up all of these facts on the spot.

And yet, in the absence of other data, we might believe all of these things if we’d seen them on television. This illustrates a central feature of modern civilization: if we wish to understand any more of the world than perhaps our own neigborhood, we have no choice but to rely on secondhand information of one form or another. This is the essence of the so-called mediated experience, from the word “mediate” meaning “to act as an intermediary.” Such experiences include traditional news media of course, but also all other forms of indirect communication: books, films, personal reports, photographs, music, even things like theme parks and exported goods. Such secondhand modes of communication may exist for many purposes, but whatever their intrinsic possibilities, they are absolutely fundamental to our current lifestyle and culture.

This has become obvious to me, away from my home culture for almost a year. I see little reminders — movies, headlines, emails from home — and I realize that I am beginning to lose touch. It is the ineffable that I miss most, the perception of what it’s like to “be there” in a particular time and place, the kind of deep knowledge which can only come from thousands of small everyday experiences. San Francsico, California, from late 2003 through summer 2004, was like what? What was on people’s minds? What were considered the important issues of the day? How did the people of that era react to world events? I cannot say for sure and will probably never know. All I had at the time were dim reflections of the actual events, courtesy of the international news media. And yet, this is the only way most of us have ever known the world at all, beyond our daily routines...