Making sense of the news

A quick recap of the big news stories from last year shows just how random our impressions of the world have become in an age of nonstop broadcasting. At various points in 2010, millions of television sets around the world were fed live images of devastation caused by earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the dispersal of volcanic ash in Iceland, floods in Pakistan, underwater footage of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the rescue of miners trapped underground in Chile, and the unusual coincidence of a lunar eclipse on the winter solstice. The mushrooming growth of online video gave all of these stories a second life on the internet, so that they quickly merged into a general archive of current affairs narratives, losing most of their specificity. In fact, unless we had a direct link to the events – as West Indians did with Haiti – it soon became difficult to remember which country was afflicted by which natural disaster, or even which city had been targeted in the latest round of suicide terrorism.

We have become so accustomed to the roving attention of live television that it seems natural for the news to leap across continents and to cover fashion shows, celebrity weddings and feuds within the same level of interest accorded to war, the economy or politics.  This tendency is likely to increase in the immediate future. One indication of this is the large number of wireless internet devices now in circulation. Last year Apple reportedly sold 10 million iPads, and nearly twice as many iPhones – bringing the number of Apple smartphones currently in use to more than 80 million. Sales of both devices, and of a wide range of competitive products that offer streaming video and 24 hour access to news updates are expected to grow rapidly in the early months of this year. (One analyst  estimates that Apple may sell more than 2 iPads per second in 2011.)

E-book sales are also on the rise. Last year Amazon sold over 8 million e-books and more than 5 million units of its most recent ebook reader. Trade publishers, newspapers and magazines are all hoping the new technology will revive weak sales and there has been plenty of fevered speculation about the new age of electronic reading. But amidst this embarrassment of electronic riches, some unfashionable doubts remain.

Since America is the country most likely to drive the development of new reading technology, its current reading habits are a useful indication of what might lie ahead.  But the US Department of Education’s National Adult Literacy Study, published in September 2009, suggests that one in five American adults can neither “locate information in text” nor “make low-level inferences using printed materials” nor even “integrate easily identifiable pieces of information.” Even more depressingly, one publisher estimates that one third of US high school graduates never read another book during the rest of their lives; that 70 per cent of US adults have not visited a bookstore in the last five years, and 80 per cent of American families did not buy a book last year. These statistics are hardly grounds for optimism. By the end of this year millions of people will be able to download a library’s worth of information to a handheld device, but are they more likely to read it than these gloomy figures suggest?

The consequences of the new illiteracy are probably most evident in what currently passes for political and financial analysis. A month ago the US President was being written off by television pundits as a “lame duck” doomed to powerlessness by the election of a stridently anti-Obama Republic Congress. Broadcast punditry has little time for the horsetrading which lies at the heart of American politics, so when the Obama administration managed, in the space of a single week, to repeal  the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy, to secure ratification of a major arms reduction agreement and to pass a health care bill for 9/11 first responders, its successes seemed startling. Of course these breakthroughs will offer Obama only a brief respite before the looming battles over budget cuts, but instead of offering a complex analysis, television tends to cover politics like sport, analyzing only the latest play with little sense of how the most recent events fit into a larger pattern.

The information age abounds with ironies. We can now gather information from all parts of the earth faster and more completely than ever before, millions of us can watch footage from a cyclone in Asia – or the murder of a woman shot by the Iranian police – as it happens, or just a few minutes after it has been filmed on a smartphone. But fewer and fewer of us are able to digest this cornucopia of information, or to make sense of the trillions of words and images now streaming through the cybersphere.  Consequently, although there is now more news available to the average citizen than at any time in recorded history, we are becoming increasingly incapable of making sense of it. Naturally there is a further irony in all this. Since the decline of our attention and interpretive skill is difficult to show on television, our growing ignorance in the age of information was also one of last year’s least noticed news stories.