The Palimpsest Problem
In May the estimable Wretchard the Cat at the Belmont Club described the events surrounding the Wedding Party that was bombed by American Troops in Iraq. Using this particular event Wretchard describes how this story is delivered via the press and the very serious limitations of simulcasted news stories.
The the Mainstream Media (MSM) has serious limitations. It is not presently configured to distribute intelligence in support of a thriving, successful democracy. The lack of persistence in the storyline and the evolving interpretation of events undermines the intelligence of the populous. This in turn undermines the civic audit functions of the populous vis a' vis the government and, in this specific case, the prosecution of war.
Wretchard has illuminated a very important limitation of how news is disseminated. The press creates a discontinuous and incoherent story. What you know is a function of the point in time in which you acquired the latest news. The press creates a stream of temporally and spatially disjointed stories without historical context to support a continuous narrative. Citizens are therefore either ignorant or misinformed concerning a specific newsworthy event. Even those of us who are news-addicts cannot keep up with the story.
This is a problem that is ripe for a solution through the use of emerging technologies. Blogs and Wiki's will solve these current limitations and will be brought to bear to solve extraordinary challenges in the future. These technologies will enable the manpower behind the blogosphere to create a unique, persistent, visual and narrative analysis of news stories.
Read more!
One of the challenges facing intellectuals at a time when the political and cultural dimensions of war have grown in relation to the purely military is how to make sense of information acquired through the public intelligence system: the news media. Because modern American warfare now involves only a very small percentage of the population it has become a kind of spectator sport where the plays are actually called from the stands. One would hope on good information. Yet a news industry whose techniques were adequate to cover traffic accidents, murders or cumbrous wars in which armies moved a few hundred yards a day must now must cover events whose complexion can alter in hours. The difference is that this time there is no low-tech acetate overlay, maps, or timeline in battalion notebook. Battlefield events are still reported like isolated traffic accidents, conveying no sense of spatial location, temporal development or continuity. To the extent that any symbols are plotted on the public mental map, they remain there, hours or days after the information has been updated. Long after it became clear that the attack may not have been an attack on a wedding party at all, the original accusation soldiered on.
The the Mainstream Media (MSM) has serious limitations. It is not presently configured to distribute intelligence in support of a thriving, successful democracy. The lack of persistence in the storyline and the evolving interpretation of events undermines the intelligence of the populous. This in turn undermines the civic audit functions of the populous vis a' vis the government and, in this specific case, the prosecution of war.
Wretchard has illuminated a very important limitation of how news is disseminated. The press creates a discontinuous and incoherent story. What you know is a function of the point in time in which you acquired the latest news. The press creates a stream of temporally and spatially disjointed stories without historical context to support a continuous narrative. Citizens are therefore either ignorant or misinformed concerning a specific newsworthy event. Even those of us who are news-addicts cannot keep up with the story.
This is a problem that is ripe for a solution through the use of emerging technologies. Blogs and Wiki's will solve these current limitations and will be brought to bear to solve extraordinary challenges in the future. These technologies will enable the manpower behind the blogosphere to create a unique, persistent, visual and narrative analysis of news stories.
Read more!
