New York University professor Jay Rosen talks to a BBC reporter about “everything happening in politics and media these days” and finds he’s struggling to articulate the questions about what’s happening – let alone the answers. “There’s too much happening,” he writes. “The public world is changing faster than we can invent terms for describing it…”
Then he lists 20 things that are changing, or being questioned, from “Political attacks seeking to discredit the press and why they’re intensifying” to “Why argument journalism is more involving than the informational kind” and “Assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer, a disinterested account”.
He adds: “It’s exciting, it’s exhausting. What I really wanted to say to the BBC guy was: There’s too much reality rushing over us every day just now. And it’s pushing me to the limits of my own vocabulary.”
He’s absolutely spot on. How can we learn where all this leads? How can media and political institutions avoid getting trampled under the rush to a completely new landscape? The crowd, of course, knows where it’s headed, if not individually then certainly collectively. The trouble comes when individuals in that crowd try to work out where it’s headed, ahead of time. That’s a tad tricky – but also rather vital for the institutions concerned.
