Some Thoughts on Journalism

There are lots of problems in the world that a person can devote time to getting informed on, or solving. Because we all have different personalities, skill sets, and positions in life, we will each be interested in and suited to solving different kinds of problems. I might be a schoolteacher who can work to improve the experience of my students, and you might be a climate scientist who works to predict the effects of our efforts to slow greenhouse gas emissions. The types of issues I need to be informed about might be things like racial achievement gaps, economic disparities between the different neighborhoods in my town, and the effects of stress on learning outcomes. These are very different from the issues that you should be aware of, like the limitations of the Paris climate accords, the importance of the oil trade, and the difficulty of accounting for Scope 3 emissions. 

It might be great if everyone be informed about all the problems of the world, because oftentimes our actions have effects on problems that we aren’t as directly engaged in solving. For example, we vote for politicians who have plans to solve all sorts of problems, and being fully informed about all the problems that the government is trying to address would help each voter to pick the politician that would address them.

But of course, we can’t be informed about everything. So the next best thing is to be informed about the issues that are most relevant to each of us. I’ll focus on being informed about school-related issues, and you’ll focus on being informed about climate-related issues.

If you accept this premise, then the ideal journalistic system (Terminology alert! “Journalistic system” is a phrase which here means “anywhere people hear about the issues, like newspapers, Youtube, blogs, TV”. Maybe “the media” would be a better phrase, but that sounds off to me in this context) would deliver the relevant news to the right people, in the right proportions. If I’m a schoolteacher, I should probably be much more worried about barriers to educational achievement than about corruption in the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia. 

So to an extent, a beneficent journalist shouldn’t want their story to be widely read and distributed if it will distract from the problems that are more important to reader. But this is not how journalism works — journalists and publications are incentivized to have each of their stories be as big as possible. So this is a flaw in the media system we have: Journalists want each of their stories to be big, not for their stories to be big in proportion to the importance of the problem they address. There’s an incentive for them to have everyone read their story on health effects of vaping or of Ghosn’s escape from Japan.

I don’t have any particular solution to this problem, other than to realize that it’s easy to think the issues that receive the most airtime, whether among friends or on the front page of the New York Times, may be taking your attention away from other issues that you are more able to address. That doesn’t mean that the high-airtime issues aren’t issues — we each just need to prioritize.

St. Paul was Just Some Guy so He's Not Always Right

In this post, I’d like to argue that it’s not very meaningful to say that the Bible is “the word of God,” and that Christians should stop treating the books of the Bible as having fundamentally higher status than other writings. 

Within Christianity, the Bible is seen as being a consistent source of truth that should guide what we believe and how we behave. Biblical verses are often used as justification for certain beliefs or moral proscriptions, and within Christian circles it’s seen as far more robust to back up your argument with a quote from St. Paul than with a quote from C.S. Lewis.

Now maybe St. Paul does know more about morality, and is more in touch with what God wants than C.S. Lewis. But the comparison isn’t often even made in discussions about God’s teaching, because what St. Paul wrote is in the Bible. And the Bible is assumed to have authority of its own.

My basic problem with treating the Bible as something “special” in terms of how much weight we give to what is written in it goes as follows:

1. Stuff written by human beings have the chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

2. The different books of the Bible were written by human beings

3. Therefore, the books of the Bible have a chance to be wrong, or not relevant to my life

I want to be very clear that I think people ought to trust the Bible less, not trust God less. If God absolutely said something, then we should absolutely listen. But the main problem with how the Bible is often used, is that it’s not acknowledged that it was written by people. And people are often wrong.

You can make arguments that God used people when writing the Bible, that the Biblical authors were divinely inspired and that everything they wrote is in some sense true, if not literally true. But those lines of thinking don’t hold water. Even if you grant that God did divinely inspire some authors to write things that are incontrovertibly true (a dubious claim in my view), how do we have all the divinely inspired writings, and only the divinely inspired writings, collected in the Bible?

The disparate writings that are included in modern versions of the Bible were writings that the early Christians thought were important. I don’t know of any good argument to show that these writings have been marked with special approval by God (if you have such an argument, please let me know). Tradition is what gives them their power, and that’s okay! Even without placing the Bible on an epistemological pedestal, the writings collected in the Bible are still valuable  as sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories. But there are other sources of wisdom, historical facts, and instructive stories, and the assumption should not be that if you learn two things, one from the Bible and one from somewhere else, then the Bible is correct.

Christianity does not need the Bible to be the inarguable source of truth in order to make sense as a faith. And requiring the Bible to be something it is not leads to closed-mindedness. If you believe that the writings in the Bible are incontrovertibly true, relevant to your life, and self-consistent, then you are locked into reading the Bible a certain way, and into learning about the world a certain way. 

Having an a priori belief that an anthology of what we think people wrote 1800-3000 years ago contain indisputable truth does not put you in a good starting place towards learning about the biggest mysteries of life. If you want to learn more about God — or even if you don’t — approach the world with an open mind. He can speak to you from anywhere. Seek the truth and you will find it.

The Art of the Digitally Socialized

Terminology alert: I will use the term Digital socialization to mean the types of social interactions that digital technology enable like sharing memes, reaction GIFs, texting, social media

The song “Reflections On The Screen” by Superoganism is a certain type of art that up till now, we haven’t had very much of. As I read it, the song is about being the emotions of being separated from someone you were once very close to. What I find innovative about how much reference the song makes to technology, and taps into the emotions I’ve had while using technology, without being about technology.

There is plenty of art out there that deals with our relationship to technology (things that immediately come to mind are OK Computer, 8th Grade, Black Mirror). But I can’t think of any other pieces of art that explore the emotional relationships we have with each other as mediated by technology.

Most art that features technology has something to say about technology itself. My hypothesis is that this is largely because the people who make most art right now did not grow up with digital socialization as a prominent part of their lives. Their formative years were not filled with smartphones, Facebook, memes, Snapchat, and texting. They have an experiential reference point to a time when digital socialization, if existent at all, was not as prominent and widespread as it is today. Digital socialization is the not the norm to them in the same way it is to people who grew up with it. So when they make art about digital socialization, there is a tendency to say something about it – it’s bad, it’s isolating, it’s changing how we interact with each other.

I was born in 1996. I got my first cellphone when I was in 8th grade, and my first smartphone during my junior year of high school. In high school, friendships were built on sharing memes, romance was mediated largely through texting, and some of my funniest memories are of conversations that happened in GroupMe chats. Each of these types of interactions has certain types of emotions associated with them.

Digital socialization made up a significant part of my adolescent life, and I can’t really imagine what it would have been like to go through high school without it. But this part of my life and the emotions associated with it are not really addressed by most of the art I consume. Much of great art is about our relationships to others, but very little of it addresses how digital socialization makes us experience these relationships unless it is trying to make a statement about digital socialization itself.

Orono Noguchi is the lead singer -- and presumably lyricist -- for the band Superorganism. I imagine that digital socialization has played an even bigger role in her life than in mine, seeing as how she’s younger than me, makes a living by creating digital content, and has cited “sharing memes and all that” as helping her bond with her fellow members of Superorganism. The lyrics of “Reflections On The Screen” read to me as if they’re written by someone who takes digital socialization as a given. She is able to articulate the specific emotions of communicating with someone who is important to you via text and GIFs, but doesn’t view this kind of communication as something interesting to explore on its own. In the same way that the Marvelettes “Please Mr. Postman” is about the emotions of waiting for a letter without being caring about how the postal system has changed people’s relationships to each other, “Reflections On The Screen” explores the emotions of looking at your phone without being “about” how smartphones have changed our methods of interaction. The postal system and digital socialization are both just facts of life for those who grew up with them, and as a part of life have emotional dimensions that are worth exploring on their own terms.

I expect we will see more of this kind of art as people like Orono Noguchi, who grew up surrounded by digital socialization and taking it for granted, reach an age where they are creating emotionally insightful art.