A single-use plastic water bottle bobbing in the ocean is not the climate crisis. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t either.
The climate crisis isn’t one self-contained thing, or even a cluster of many self-contained things; the climate crisis is the cumulative effect of decades of individual choices, corporate policies, technological innovations, and regulatory ducking and weaving — and all the overlapping between each.
We need to do something about the environmental waste we have created, without question. But focusing exclusively on ad hoc solutions — fishing that water bottle out, collecting accumulated plastic one scoop at a time and transferring it out for recycling — won’t address the reasons the waste got there in the first place. And so it will keep flowing.
Similarly, a single conspiracy theory, hoax, or racist attack is not the network crisis. The most toxic, violent space online isn’t either.
The network crisis is the cumulative effect of decades of individual choices, corporate policies, technological innovations, and regulatory ducking and weaving — and all the overlapping between each.
We need to do something about the digital waste we have created, without question. But focusing exclusively on ad hoc solutions — suspending the harassing account, deplatforming the white supremacist group and watching as its members scurry to some other, less-regulated site — won’t address the reasons the waste got there in the first place. And so it will keep flowing.
The most obvious difference between the climate crisis and the network crisis is where each unfolds. The most obvious similarity is the threats they each represent. The ideas we share, the information we process, and the communities we build might not be as tangible as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we cultivate — but when poisoned, they are equally perilous.
With so much at stake in 2020, more journalists (and more people generally) will be willing to approach networked spaces ecologically. They will do so heeding the words of botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer, who notes in her poetic reflection Braiding Sweetgrass that we must reframe our relationship to the environment if we hope to make any lasting change. If we hope, more pressingly, to save ourselves and our children. Kimmerer is speaking of the natural world, but her argument is just as true of digital spaces: If we don’t begin to tell different stories about the digital landscape, if we don’t begin to shift our mindset to what Kimmerer describes as an ethics of responsibility, one that acknowledges the fundamental reciprocity between people, technologies, and institutions, we cannot begin to act differently.
Doing so won’t just be about embracing a new framework, one that situates all of us squarely within the environment as people whose tweets and articles and snark are fundamentally part of the story we’re covering. It will also mean challenging the assumptions that have been enshrined within journalism for generations and throughout Western thought for much longer than that.
The first is the two-pronged presumption that facts are enough to save us, and that, when confronted by hate and other malignancies, sunlight will disinfect them. The roots of these assumptions extend well beyond Louis Brandeis’ ubiquitous 1913 coinage. They are foundational to the political philosophies upon which the United States and other liberal democracies are built. Far beyond that, they reach back into the Enlightenment, whose entire project was to vanquish ignorance and superstition through the light of reason — light that was, itself, the inheritor of a centuries-old Judeo-Christian tradition (particularly the extreme dualism within Catholicism) linking virtue and truth to divine light. We are primed in the West to believe that light is, essentially, magic — whatever ails us, it will cure.
The cover engraving on Voltaire’s book on Newtonian philosophy; the figure emanating divine (scientific) light is Newton himself. Eighteen-century art often featured images of women, representing Truth, holding mirrors to best reflect that light and show the world as it really was (see Reichardt and Cohen 1998).
A host of related beliefs, each seemingly natural and necessary, have percolated out through this same Enlightenment-era root system. One is the belief that individual people are wholly autonomous, atomistic, independent subjects, encapsulated in the idea that it’s reporter’s job to publish the facts and the reader’s job to decide what to do with them. Always separate, always housed in our own discrete little bubbles. Another belief is that freedom is about remaining free from external restriction, including editorial restriction. (I can certainly attest to this presumption, given how many reporters have balked at the concept of strategic silence when covering hate groups.) Yet another is that the marketplace of ideas will filter all the news that’s fit to print, floating the best arguments and most relevant facts to the top of the pile. Rationality will prevail, as the bright light of truth shines down upon us.
A growing number of journalists in 2020 — and critics, and everyday folks — will begin asking a series of simple yet devastating questions in response to these assumptions. Are the things we have always assumed to be true, true? Do the things we have always assumed to work, work? Have they ever, and for whom?
As they ask these questions, these journalists and critics and everyday folks will consider, for instance, the failures of the marketplace of ideas — how it cannot even begin to function in the face of algorithmic amplification, media manipulation, and economic systems that reward and incentivize the loudest, most abusive, most misleading voices. (Shireen Mitchell speaks to this point here.) They’ll ask how free speech can be when those loudest, most abusive, most misleading voices are able to snatch the microphone away from everyone else. They’ll ask how reliable an ally the truth really is. And then they’ll ask what we do next, given the flipside of Kimmerer’s claim that all flourishing is mutual. It is — and so is all harm. So is all pollution.
What now, they will ask. What do we do? And there will be no answer, not yet.
As a counterbalance, there will be people who resist all this in 2020, who defend status quo action and status quo thinking. The marketplace of ideas works fine, they’ll say; the problem is that we don’t have enough facts. The freest possible speech and freest possible spread of information makes society stronger — incidentally, a position held by corporate executives and white supremacist hotbeds alike. In other words: But it’s served me well. But I am comfortable. But I am profiting.
For those who are well and comfortable and profiting, let’s walk together. Let’s explore the polluted shores. Let’s survey the burned-out houses and harvest the poisoned fruit and bear witness to the anguished bodies. Then look me in the eye. How well is your way going?
Whether or not the change we need is enacted — nothing short of a Green New Deal for network pollution will do — will depend entirely on the ratio between those who refuse to relinquish their ideological comforts and those are willing to reimagine their relationship to the landscape, for better and for worse, and who are prepared to work through the resulting anxiety and grief. What happens next is unknowable. But 2020 will help seal the outcome.
Whitney Phillips is an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University.
A single-use plastic water bottle bobbing in the ocean is not the climate crisis. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t either.
The climate crisis isn’t one self-contained thing, or even a cluster of many self-contained things; the climate crisis is the cumulative effect of decades of individual choices, corporate policies, technological innovations, and regulatory ducking and weaving — and all the overlapping between each.
We need to do something about the environmental waste we have created, without question. But focusing exclusively on ad hoc solutions — fishing that water bottle out, collecting accumulated plastic one scoop at a time and transferring it out for recycling — won’t address the reasons the waste got there in the first place. And so it will keep flowing.
Similarly, a single conspiracy theory, hoax, or racist attack is not the network crisis. The most toxic, violent space online isn’t either.
The network crisis is the cumulative effect of decades of individual choices, corporate policies, technological innovations, and regulatory ducking and weaving — and all the overlapping between each.
We need to do something about the digital waste we have created, without question. But focusing exclusively on ad hoc solutions — suspending the harassing account, deplatforming the white supremacist group and watching as its members scurry to some other, less-regulated site — won’t address the reasons the waste got there in the first place. And so it will keep flowing.
The most obvious difference between the climate crisis and the network crisis is where each unfolds. The most obvious similarity is the threats they each represent. The ideas we share, the information we process, and the communities we build might not be as tangible as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we cultivate — but when poisoned, they are equally perilous.
With so much at stake in 2020, more journalists (and more people generally) will be willing to approach networked spaces ecologically. They will do so heeding the words of botanist and member of the Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer, who notes in her poetic reflection Braiding Sweetgrass that we must reframe our relationship to the environment if we hope to make any lasting change. If we hope, more pressingly, to save ourselves and our children. Kimmerer is speaking of the natural world, but her argument is just as true of digital spaces: If we don’t begin to tell different stories about the digital landscape, if we don’t begin to shift our mindset to what Kimmerer describes as an ethics of responsibility, one that acknowledges the fundamental reciprocity between people, technologies, and institutions, we cannot begin to act differently.
Doing so won’t just be about embracing a new framework, one that situates all of us squarely within the environment as people whose tweets and articles and snark are fundamentally part of the story we’re covering. It will also mean challenging the assumptions that have been enshrined within journalism for generations and throughout Western thought for much longer than that.
The first is the two-pronged presumption that facts are enough to save us, and that, when confronted by hate and other malignancies, sunlight will disinfect them. The roots of these assumptions extend well beyond Louis Brandeis’ ubiquitous 1913 coinage. They are foundational to the political philosophies upon which the United States and other liberal democracies are built. Far beyond that, they reach back into the Enlightenment, whose entire project was to vanquish ignorance and superstition through the light of reason — light that was, itself, the inheritor of a centuries-old Judeo-Christian tradition (particularly the extreme dualism within Catholicism) linking virtue and truth to divine light. We are primed in the West to believe that light is, essentially, magic — whatever ails us, it will cure.
The cover engraving on Voltaire’s book on Newtonian philosophy; the figure emanating divine (scientific) light is Newton himself. Eighteen-century art often featured images of women, representing Truth, holding mirrors to best reflect that light and show the world as it really was (see Reichardt and Cohen 1998).
A host of related beliefs, each seemingly natural and necessary, have percolated out through this same Enlightenment-era root system. One is the belief that individual people are wholly autonomous, atomistic, independent subjects, encapsulated in the idea that it’s reporter’s job to publish the facts and the reader’s job to decide what to do with them. Always separate, always housed in our own discrete little bubbles. Another belief is that freedom is about remaining free from external restriction, including editorial restriction. (I can certainly attest to this presumption, given how many reporters have balked at the concept of strategic silence when covering hate groups.) Yet another is that the marketplace of ideas will filter all the news that’s fit to print, floating the best arguments and most relevant facts to the top of the pile. Rationality will prevail, as the bright light of truth shines down upon us.
A growing number of journalists in 2020 — and critics, and everyday folks — will begin asking a series of simple yet devastating questions in response to these assumptions. Are the things we have always assumed to be true, true? Do the things we have always assumed to work, work? Have they ever, and for whom?
As they ask these questions, these journalists and critics and everyday folks will consider, for instance, the failures of the marketplace of ideas — how it cannot even begin to function in the face of algorithmic amplification, media manipulation, and economic systems that reward and incentivize the loudest, most abusive, most misleading voices. (Shireen Mitchell speaks to this point here.) They’ll ask how free speech can be when those loudest, most abusive, most misleading voices are able to snatch the microphone away from everyone else. They’ll ask how reliable an ally the truth really is. And then they’ll ask what we do next, given the flipside of Kimmerer’s claim that all flourishing is mutual. It is — and so is all harm. So is all pollution.
What now, they will ask. What do we do? And there will be no answer, not yet.
As a counterbalance, there will be people who resist all this in 2020, who defend status quo action and status quo thinking. The marketplace of ideas works fine, they’ll say; the problem is that we don’t have enough facts. The freest possible speech and freest possible spread of information makes society stronger — incidentally, a position held by corporate executives and white supremacist hotbeds alike. In other words: But it’s served me well. But I am comfortable. But I am profiting.
For those who are well and comfortable and profiting, let’s walk together. Let’s explore the polluted shores. Let’s survey the burned-out houses and harvest the poisoned fruit and bear witness to the anguished bodies. Then look me in the eye. How well is your way going?
Whether or not the change we need is enacted — nothing short of a Green New Deal for network pollution will do — will depend entirely on the ratio between those who refuse to relinquish their ideological comforts and those are willing to reimagine their relationship to the landscape, for better and for worse, and who are prepared to work through the resulting anxiety and grief. What happens next is unknowable. But 2020 will help seal the outcome.
Whitney Phillips is an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University.
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Bill Grueskin Our ethics codes get an overhaul
Irving Washington Leadership isn’t something you learn on the job
Jeremy Gilbert and Jarrod Dicker A call for collaboration between storytelling and tech
A.J. Bauer A fork in the road for conservative media
Sarah Stonbely More people start caring about news inequality
Felix Salmon Spotify launches a news channel
Geneva Overholser Death to bothsidesism
Craig Newmark Formalizing newsrooms’ battle against disinformation
Tom Glaisyer Journalism can emerge newly vibrant and powerful
Meg Marco Everything happens somewhere
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Rachel Schallom The value of push alerts goes beyond open rates
Greg Emerson News apps fall further behind
Beena Raghavendran The year of the local engagement reporter
Cristina Kim Public media stops trying to serve “everybody”
Pablo Boczkowski The day after November 4
Tonya Mosley The neutrality vs. objectivity game ends
S. Mitra Kalita The race to 2021
Errin Haines Race and gender aren’t a 2020 story — they’re the story
Steve Henn The dawning audio web
Kathleen Searles Pay more attention to attention
Helen Havlak Platforms shine a light on original reporting
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Matt DeRienzo Local broadcasters begin to fill the gaps left by newspapers
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M. Scott Havens First-party data becomes media’s most important currency
Josh Schwartz Publishers move beyond the metered paywall
Brenda P. Salinas Treating MP3 files like text
Victor Pickard We reclaim a public good
Matthew Pressman News consumers divide into haves and have-nots
Rachel Davis Mersey The business of local TV news will enter its downward slide
Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young The promise of nonprofit journalism
Jonas Kaiser Russian bots are just today’s slacktivists
Sarah Schmalbach Journalist, quantify thyself
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Richard Tofel A constraint of the reader-revenue model emerges
Emily Withrow The year we kill the news article
Simon Galperin Journalism becomes more democratic
Joanne McNeil A return to blogs (finally? sort of?)
Whitney Phillips A time to question core beliefs
Bill Adair A Nobel Prize, a Brad Pitt film, and a Taylor Swift song
Laura E. Davis Know the context your journalism is operating within
Rick Berke Incoming fire from both left and right
Alice Antheaume Trade “politics” for “power”
Lucas Graves A smarter conversation about how (and why) fact-checking matters
Dan Shanoff Sports media enters the Bronny era
Carrie Brown-Smith Engaged journalism: It’s finally happening
Kevin D. Grant The free press stands against authoritarians’ attacks on truth
Sarah Alvarez I’m ready for post-news
Candis Callison Taking a cue from Indigenous journalists on climate change
Ernie Smith The death of the industry fad
Alana Levinson Brand-backed media gets another look
Eric Nuzum Podcasting finally creates another mega-hit show
Masuma Ahuja Slower, quieter, more measured and thoughtful
Jake Shapiro Podcasting gets listener relationship management
Ben Werdmuller Use the tools of journalism to save it
Jakob Moll A slow-moving tech backlash among young people
Mike Caulfield Native verification tools for the blue checkmark crowd
John Garrett It’s the best time in a century to start a local news organization
Mariana Moura Santos The future of journalism is collaborative
Gordon Crovitz Fighting misinformation requires journalism, not secret algorithms
Christa Scharfenberg It’s time to make journalism a field that supports and respects women
John Keefe Journalism gets hacked
Kerri Hoffman Opening closed systems
Colleen Shalby Journalists become media literacy teachers
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Anthony Nadler Clash of Clans: Election Edition
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Seth C. Lewis 20 questions for 2020
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Elizabeth Dunbar Frank talk, and then action
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Joshua P. Darr All that campaign cash will make the media’s problems worse
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Jim Brady We’ll complain about other people living in bubbles while ignoring our own
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Cindy Royal Prepare media students for skills, not job titles
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Carl Bialik Journalists will try running the whole shop
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Monica Drake A renewed focus on misinformation
Don Day Respect the non-paying audience
Francesco Zaffarano TikTok without generational prejudice
Raney Aronson-Rath News deserts will proliferate — but so will new solutions
Barbara Gray Join local libraries on the frontlines of civic engagement
Alexandra Borchardt Get out of the office and talk to people
Jeremy Olshan All journalism should be service journalism
Dannagal G. Young Let’s disrupt the logic that’s driving Americans apart
Tanya Cordrey Saying no to more good ideas
Heidi Tworek The year of positive pushback
Sara K. Baranowski A big year for little newspapers
Brian Moritz The end of “stick to sports”
Heather Bryant Some kinds of journalism aren’t worth saving
J. Siguru Wahutu Western journalists, learn from your African peers
Sarah Marshall The year to learn about news moments
Nico Gendron Make better products if you want to reach Gen Z
Stefanie Murray Charitable giving goes collaborative
Mira Lowe The year of student-powered journalism
Fiona Spruill The climate crisis gets the coverage it deserves
Annie Rudd The expanded ambiguity of the news photograph
Linda Solomon Wood Everyone in your organization, moving toward a common goal
Kristen Muller The year we operationalize community engagement
Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb Local news initiatives run into a capital shortage
Jeff Kofman Speed through technology
Logan Molyneux and Shannon McGregor Think twice before turning to Twitter
Joe Amditis Collaborative journalism takes its rightful place at the table
Logan Jaffe You don’t need fancy tools to listen
Talia Stroud The work of reconnecting starts November 4
Knight Foundation Five generations of journalists, learning from each other
Moreno Cruz Osório In Brazil, collaboration in a time of state attacks
Joni Deutsch Podcasting unsilences the silent
Tamar Charney From broadcast to bespoke
Kourtney Bitterly Transparency isn’t just a desire, it’s an expectation
Catalina Albeanu Rebuilding journalism, together