Earth from space: NASA
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
What humanity needs is a shared, factual narrative.
Not just a myth to live by, as Joseph Campbell articulated in a series of interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS way back in the 20th century. I’ve written about this before, even in my own book.
The Power of Myth to Obscure the Truth
But for much of the 20th century, at least the American people who could and did read had a shared narrative to live by in the form of the mass circulation daily newspaper, although the picture got muddied up by the partisan political divide, driven by capitalism.
This confusion exploded on television, although in the early days television news helped spread the shared narrative. News reporters like Edward R. Murrow read the newspapers and published his reports on the radio back during World War II, and then made the transition to television. Then CBS News came along, with anchor Walter Cronkite, who also read the newspapers and wire reports and was a voice of reason on the tube.
Cable television only created a larger explosion. In the early days of cable, CNN did some honorable work, becoming a real force during the first Gulf War. But Time, Inc. came in, took it over and corporatized it, forcing Ted Turner into a billionaire’s retirement on his buffalo ranch in Montana. To save money, they stopped using associate producers, and went with two-person teams, the camera operator and on air talent. The associate producers were doing the research, the reporting, and wrote and shaped what was said on the air. They disappeared a long time ago, which is just one reason I stopped paying any serious attention to television news.
The shared narrative that was already frayed seemed to split wide open early in the 21st century, in part driven by the personal computer revolution and the spread of internet access, a technology that in the early days was promoted as a force that would spread democracy around the world and give us the tools to save the planet from the coming climate change crisis due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation.
In the late 1990s, when I was teaching journalism, including environmental journalism, and working on a Ph.D. in Knoxville, Tennessee in science communication and environmental sociology, I got so excited about the coverage of global warming in The New York Times that I sent an email to editors at the Science section and asked to speak to William K. Stevens on the phone. He graciously returned my call, and we talked for a while about the science. I was planning a dissertation on media effects on public opinion, focusing on the environmental issue of global warming.
He was about to retire from writing for the paper and publish his own book on the subject.
The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate
Seven years later, he published an essay in the Times which seemed to settle the debate once and for all.
On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty
But of course politics being what it is, especially Republican politics, the definitive evidence from science did not settle the political debate.
Around that same time, when many writers were publishing blogs on the web, including me, Mark Zuckerberg hooked up with the copyright music thief Sean Parker and right-wing fund raiser and PayPal founder Peter Thiel and created theFacebook, which became just Facebook.
So far social media platforms on the web that people access through the internet have only created an even bigger explosion of the divide, in spite of Zuckerberg’s half-hearted college drop out slogan about “connecting people” on Facebook.
Without this shared narrative, chaos and confusion only grow, making it nearly impossible for the public in a democracy to agree on any solution to any problem in society. And the more people allow themselves to be subject to the constant media bombardment of mixed messages on the radio, cable television and social media platforms, the explosions will only get bigger and problems will become intractable, if they aren’t already. There is too much noise in the system.
For all this business about being “woke” or not, for everyone who claims they can “do their own research,” and “decide for themselves,” the confusion, anger and division only grow worse.
I’ve seen many examples of this over the years. Here’s one. When I was hiding out from Covid in Western North Carolina with a view of Mount Mitchell in the summer of 2019, I planted a 1,000 square foot organic all heirloom seed garden in the backyard of a cousin of mine. Unfortunately, her husband was a conservative who got his news from Fox and Trump’s email list and YouTube channel. When Trump was pushing the false conspiracy theory that China purposely created the coronavirus in a lab, and I pointed out that it actually started in the Wuhan meat market, he said, I kid you not, “Well if it’s OK I will believe what I want to believe.” But it wasn’t what he believed. It was what Trump told him to believe. He only thought he was thinking for himself.
He later said everything in the “liberal media” was “total bullshit,” then threatened to kill me. That’s when I fled back to D.C. for the 2020 election.
This chaos and confusion is one of the reasons psychological experts, the National Park Service, environmental journalists like me and other academic experts advise people to find an excuse and the time to literally turn off the bombardment of radio and TV and find a place for peace and quiet in nature where you can actually have an original thought of your own.
It will take some time in such a place, so don’t think you can do it in one short weekend camping trip or an hour in a local park, although that might very well help.
This is one reason I purposely designed my own semi-retirement life to involve spending many weeks and months immersed in nature. Yes, I have access to all the content on the web, and much of what comes across the airwaves on public radio and broadcast television too. But the more hours each day and night I spend outdoors and not connected, when I turn back on the radio, TV or get back online the more I become disgusted with most of the content that passes for news these days.
Most of it is just distracting noise, and is doing more harm than good for individual psychology and society at large.
It has become even more clear to me than ever before that you have to spend time reading in-depth way past the daily clickbait headlines, which of course you can do with an internet connection, and then go spend a few hours offline thinking about what you have read. This is absolutely critical for any chance to come up with an original thought. And it is definitely critical if you expect to reach a level of thinking to design a solution to any problem.
The smartest of our previous presidents knew how important time alone in nature is, well before the era of television or the internet.
Camp David: The White House in the Mountains of Maryland.
So it was on a recent evening when I had gone several days without listening to a minute of NPR or one single clip from any talking head on TeeVee. I did put a rough formula on Facebook for my friends, fans and followers to see.
A Window Opens in Time – Concentration+Study+Time for Reflection=Epiphany, when clarity emerges from chaos.
Remember the original theory from my book? The secret of Success is: Preparation (Education)+Opportunity=Success.
Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again
Let’s take it up a notch.
As you probably already know, this is just a friendly reminder, an epiphany can be defined as: a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; or an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking; or an illuminating discovery, realization or disclosure.
Think of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree thinking in 1665 — more than 100 years before the American Revolution — and noticing an apple fall straight down from the tree limb to the ground and declaring “ah ha!”
“Legend has it that Isaac Newton formulated gravitational theory in 1665 or 1666 after watching an apple fall and asking why the apple fell straight down, rather than sideways or even upward,” according to one account in National Geographic that comes up high in a Google search.
“He showed that the force that makes the apple fall and that holds us on the ground is the same as the force that keeps the moon and planets in their orbits,” said Martin Rees, a former president of Britain’s Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science, which was once headed by Newton himself.
“His theory of gravity wouldn’t have got us global positioning satellites,” said Jeremy Gray, a mathematical historian at the Milton Keynes, U.K.-based Open University. “But it was enough to develop space travel.”
My specialty is a social science, not physics like Newton, although in communications studies we also draw knowledge from the hard sciences. It is really a crying shame that the “daily press” has never covered this field, not even The New York Times, which is why nobody knows anything about it. Another way this news website is unique.
As I sit here in this dark, quiet campground in the mountain woods I’m often thinking about the connection of all the recent trends looking for an opening. Some of these you may know about, some most likely not, unless you closely follow my Facebook and email feed.
You may have heard that Rachel Maddow is stepping down from her daily show on MSNBC, so I figure there may be a chance soon to get liberals and democrats to pay attention to something else for a change.
Also, it has recently been announced that Robert Allbritton’s Politico sold out for $1 billion to German media titan Axel Springer, meaning it will no doubt become corporatized and the new owners will inevitably bleed all the money out of it and announce cutbacks and spend less money on real journalism, as always happens in these buyouts, mergers and acquisitions.
Even better, for us, another web news publication, Axios, which was also started by former Washington Post reporters, including Jim VandeHei who started Politico, also sold out to Cox News for $525 million. You’ve probably never heard of Cox Enterprises, since it has not been very active in the internet age. It is the company that still owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in Georgia, one of the worst of what’s left of the mass circulation daily newspapers. Just take one glance at the website and you will see what I mean.
I must admit and disclose here a personal beef I have with that company. In 2004 and 2005 when I was living in Alexandria, Virginia and commuting to work in D.C. on the Metro as the last hired reporter for States New Service with a newsroom on Pennsylvania Avenue just a couple of blocks from the White House, I got a call one day from the editors of Creative Loafing, an alternative weekly in Atlanta. They said they wanted to hire me for good money to move to Buckhead and write about politics and the environment around the South. They said I was the top candidate and the job was mine if I would pack up my stuff and come there immediately.
It seemed like a dream job so how could I refuse? I was at the end of my lease agreement in the apartment in Alexandria, so I did not renew. I packed my stuff into a van and hauled ass to Atlanta. I met the editors for an interview, and then drove to Birmingham to check on my 79-year-old mother.
I waited, and waited, for two weeks to hear for sure about the job. Finally, I got the call back. It was not good news. The editors told me that Cox News, which owned a 25-percent stake in the company that owned four alternative weeklies, including Creative Loafing and others in North Carolina and Florida, was having financial troubles and demanded their shares in the company be bought out for cash.
Boom. They could no longer pay me the big bucks. So no job.
At that time my mom was having health issues, and the neighborhood she lived in was growing unsafe. I took some time to think about it, and made the excruciating decision not to pack my things and go back to D.C.
Not long after that, the alternative weekly newspaper company filed for bankruptcy, and within months, all four of those newspapers went out of business and stopped publishing.
There is no doubt that Cox will destroy Axios, which has been buying up local news sites, mostly started by former reporters for local newspapers, and practicing an even more lame version of local news than AP. Most of the little reports are not even full blown news stories. They are “30 second reads,” the modern web equivalent of the wire news briefs that ran in the papers back in the 20th century.
This is just a continuation of the capitalist trend of treating news as a marketable commodity, with no consideration of the mission of the press under the First Amendment to cover public affairs. Just more local pro-business stories, stories about food and crap. There is not one single example of them actually investigating anything or holding one corrupt politician to account.
Screw them. Good riddance. Of course they are rich little shits now, and can buy themselves a dude ranch in Wyoming and go play cowboy.
The fabulously wealthy are fueling a booming luxury ranch market out West
Also, it was just announced that Trump critic Brian Stelter’s show on the media “Reliable Sources” has been canceled at CNN by new CEO Chris Licht, who seemingly wants more Republican guests and less Democratic Party talking points.
The horribly timed defenestration of Brian Stelter
… one notable remark. “It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic,†he said. “We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.”
Clearly that’s no longer the policy at CNN.
Then remember back when Arianna Huffington sold the Huffington Post to America Online (AOL) — the company that took over and destroyed Time, Inc. — for $315 million and soon disappeared, right around the time that the Graham family sold The Washington Post to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for only $250 million?
In other good news, it was recently announced that Facebook had finally hit the global traffic plateau, dropping in daily active users on a quarterly basis for the first time, from 1.93 billion to 1.92 billion globally. After seeing a pandemic boost in online activity throughout 2020, its “revenue and earnings growth is beginning to slow down.”
After the Facebook owner Meta reported missed quarterly earnings and a slowly shrinking user base, the company’s stock dropped.
According to Bloomberg News, Meta Platforms Inc.’s one-day crash “now ranks as the worst in stock-market history.”
The Facebook parent plunged 26 percent on the back of woeful earnings results, and erased about $251.3 billion in market value.
“That’s the biggest wipeout in market value for any U.S. company ever.”
So if there was ever a time to begin creating a competitor to Facebook, now would be it. I’m back working on the business plan to build a better media and social media system where the algorithms are intended and designed to save democracy and the planet. If that was the mission, what would this actually look like? I’ve got most of the pieces nailed down now.
But to create something that would be successful, you cannot just look at this as another capitalist project to profit from news as a commodity and user data as the basis for an advertising database.
You have to understand things in evolutionary terms, and design the system to reframe the outdated narratives and myths we are struggling to live by in 20th century terms here in the 21st century.
Look, storytelling is a basic human skill born of a basic social need and evolved as Homo sapiens evolved from more than 10,000 years ago up to now.
“People hear a good story once and remember it for the rest of their lives,” some scholars say. “A good story invariably ‘travels’ with them. Literary devices, such as metaphor, dialogue and dramatic tension all help us confront the unknown and make sense of the complexity of the human experience.”
Scientists and science communicators have for years been trying to come up with a narrative about the universe that replaces the creation story, but have so far failed to fully capture the human imagination. Yes, church attendance and religiosity in the human population has been in decline for decades. But the creation story lives on, putting a sky god over all of physics and cosmology, even though most scientists do not believe a word of it.
On the NASA mission to the moon in 1969, Buzz Aldrin was a Catholic who wanted to celebrate communion on the moon. But the move was controversial, so the world didn’t hear it because a famous atheist had given NASA grief over Apollo 8 astronauts publicly reading from the Bible.
It was unfortunate for progress on a new narrative, but Lunar Module Pilot William Anders began the Christmas Eve, 1968 broadcast with this.
“The crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you: ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.'”
But we know it wasn’t a god. It was a Big Bang, and the Webb Telescope is now providing us with the most amazing images ever of deep space and the development of the universe through time. If you see a god in here anywhere, will you please point him out to me?
Webb’s first deep field image, showing the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723: NASA
If you are curious enough to explore the physics of time, this is one place to start your reading, a recent summary of the scientific thinking in the field of research pioneered by Albert Einstein.
A Debate Over the Physics of Time
But what we should be contemplating is not just what happened in the past, although that is incredibly important to understand. And if the present doesn’t really exist (whoops, it’s already gone), how do we guide what happens in the future?
That is the billion dollar survival question, isn’t it?
A couple of the most worrisome problems going forward is to figure out how to get a handle on the problem of Entropy, a measure of the disorder in a system. If it turns out that this chaos and disorder always increases, a point encoded in the second law of thermodynamics, and change is always accelerating exponentially, then what?
I tackled the change problem here, back in 2011. When I wrote the piece on change, we had the Obamas at the helm of the U.S. government. Some semblance of balance and equilibrium was reached, even if a minority of the population spent the entire time screaming for “change” back to what they wanted, a time before the Civil War.
On the Accelerating, Exponential Rate of Change in Society
So what force might set it right again, restoring balance and result in a system reaching something close to equilibrium?
Or is that even possible?
I do believe there is an answer, and much of the research exists in a little known field of science called Information Theory, along with my own research specialty in Science Communications and Environmental Sociology, with a special research focus in media effects on public opinion.
Sitting here in this dark, quiet campground north of D.C. not far from Camp David, I’ve finally calmed down in terms of all the news about Trump. I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that Trump will soon be gone from the scene and will no longer be able to dominate our attention. Either he will die, like any day now. Or at some point he will finally be charged with at least one of the crimes he’s clearly guilty of violating. The investigation is ongoing, and there’s a prosecutor from my home state of Alabama playing a leading role.
Pressure Mounts on Justice Department to Bring Charges Against Trump
Many fear that this will only fire up Trump’s radical, brain washed supporters and could lead to civil war. But I contend that once they see their leader found guilty of crimes, many in his movement will go silent and run away. There is much historical precedent for this.
“Cut off the head of the snake and the body will die,” is an oft used metaphor in literature and film.
The sooner this happens the better, of course. If his followers want to kill themselves by shooting at cops, that is NOT a winning evolutionary strategy of success for them.
We must adopt a well thought out strategy for evolutionary success. There is not one media outlet or social media platform with any personnel even remotely thinking about any of this. All they can think about is typing code, going for data on people and producing clickbait, and raking in billions of dollars from advertising. This is simply Capitalism, an economic system that is woefully inadequate at solving even our most basic economic disparity problems, much less the digital divide or our other massive communications problems.
If I must reiterate it for new readers here, that was not the only thing that drove early 20th century newspaper publishers to invent “objective journalism.” The success of democracy and the triumph of scientific knowledge was behind it. Yes, they had to figure out a way to fund this information system, so it was also about how to make money on advertising and subscriptions to report solid information.
Exposing Corruption in the American Press is Critical for the Future of Democracy
This is what we have lost.
I cannot get this information to every individual person on Facebook all by myself by putting it in their damn comments. A new system must be developed to get it to every reading, thinking person on the planet at the same time. If we can reach the “influencers” — not just those leading the traffic in TikTok videos but every human who still reads news and engages in social and political activism — we can build the tools they need to change the system with us from the ground up.
As we sit here today with the jumble of channels all basically sharing the same nonsense, there is no newspaper, no TV station, no news website, no social media platform, nowhere in the world for people to get this new narrative. Only here.
In this country and on this planet right now, we have the resources and the power to build it. The right people are simply not listening. There is way too much noise in the communications system.
I wrote this series three years ago to begin the intellectual process of figuring this out. It is still a good starting point for anyone interested in joining this futuristic journey with us. Won’t you Jump on the Bus and help share the news?
How to Create a Functioning Communications System to Save Democracy and the Planet
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