Letters from Jo'burg

Recently, the French newspaper Le monde discussed a study made by Observatoire du débat public , about the changing habit of catching up with the news. This is a particularly interesting subject, in a time in which different ways to distribute and disseminate, on- and offline, are becoming widespread.
A shift occurred from the traditional consumer, which had very stable habits (his days were characterised by the ritual of listening at the Morning News on the radio, of reading “his/her” newspaper or “his/her” weekly magazine, and the television “liturgy” at eight o’clock in the evening) to a completely different way of using the media.

Today people grasp bits of news at no specific time, that is to say more or less all the time, during the whole day, from different medias (radio, free and paid newspaper, the net, television etc.). The amount of news read, listened to or watched during the day in this way risk to be massive, oversized and overwhelming. Why then people wants it and continue to look for new information?
The answer given at the interviews in the report are different:
some people said that the reason is the will not to be considered stupid (“passer pour un idiot”); much more wanted to be connected with the rest of the world; someone said that we need to know enough to make conversations with colleagues (“assez pour discuter avec des collègues”) and not to be excluded from the people who know (“pas être exclu de la communauté de ceux qui savent”).
But a much more disturbing point is the need to be up to date about the many possible threats pending in our world (“se mettre en veille, parce que l'on est aux aguets face aux dangers qui grondent”). This is not necessarily related to nearby events, but is more global in scope. The widespread conviction is that we need to be aware of events that happens as far as the other side of the planet, because today in our everyday life we can suffer for an outbreak of a plague originated everywhere in the world, not only in our specific country, or for a speech made by a terrorist somewhere in the Middle East.
This nervousness in getting updated news can explain why we tend to look at bits of information continuously during the day, making some kind of “news shopping”, eventually risking, consciously or unconsciounsly, a sort of bulimia. Quite often we don’t even look for it (the specific news we look for are the one that we understand and digest better, of course), but is thrown at us from screens, from free newspapers, from radios and televisions turned on in public places (such as pubs or restaurant), from casual browsing. These are sort of fast-food infos, quick and simple.
Facing this crude and unpolished information, the final impression is something decontextualised, without a clear knowledge of the events or of the people involved. This is not due exclusively to the multiplication of different media, but also to a willingness to know the fact more than what commentators have to say about it. The idea is to make one’s own opinion, not to passively adopt the one derived from simply one external source. The point is that more often than not people is not able to understand and give an order to these crude events, for lack of time and of reading. In this case the result is an increase of uncertainty.
The other possibility is to actually deepen the knowledge on specific bits of news, following one’s own interests, fears, desires etc., creating a personal and selective “newspaper”. Or to begin a news-diet, limiting oneself to specific times and topics of interest.


These last two solutions sketched in the report, in my opinion, are the ones that gave birth and feed the burst of weblogs around the world. The weblogs are often simply a way of filtering news in a human and sustenable way. But this is another story and deserves a post of its own.