Stochastic Global Awareness

November 30th 2007 at 2:20 pm

I just love this phrase “Stochastic Global Awareness” that Chad Orzel used to refer to the odd way he finds news via various back channel personal and random blogs.

I don’t follow a lot of mainstream news sources any more, because they mostly just piss me off, so I end up getting most of my news from an assortment of blogs and LiveJournals and other web sites, which means that I have a weirdly spotty understanding of what’s going on in the world.

I’m interested in this because after reading a book about media matters I cut news watching out my life. I think it was the book ‘Fear.’

Here’s the thing. There is no concerted Media conspiracy other than our own participatory inclination to pay more attention to shocking or bad news than good. Since newsrooms became money-making and advertising-focused (if you’re my age, go see a movie call NETWORK as a starter) it’s easier to serve up bloody headlines, and a healthy platter of fear. Because it gets you more viewers and more attention. Ditto controversy.

Case in point, having done professional blogging and consulting, I’ll say that I can easily predict affects headlines and initial first sentence controversy or fear headlines will incite feedback and eyeballs. If I want ad money, or attention, it’s hard not to, just by the dint of how your readership responds, to give in.

Therefore, headline or standard news sources are actually damaging, I believe, to any healthy attempt to actually understand what is going on the world.

Anecdote: when I was fifteen I visited an elderly in-law who’d been living in her house for a decade or so with home health care. At some point I realized that if I walked into a room with her alone, she’d scurry away, wide eyed with what looked like fear. My stepdad explained that after 10 years of watching TV and being out of contact with the general population, she believed that teenagers were *all* thieves, murderers and rapists. It’s all she ever saw on TV news. The world had gone downhill for her. Outside it was some Mad Max-like world.

A second anecdote: when Hurricane Marilyn hit St. Thomas the local Woolworth’s collapsed, the building all but falling apart. While most of the rest of the island, damaged and windswept, crawled out from underneath the rubble, a number of people looted Woolworths.

If you were watching news networks, it looked like the 100,000 people of St. Thomas had descended into lawlessness and the whole island was looting and going nuts while people were being medi-vaced out.

Although Chad wonders if he shouldn’t get more active about news viewing, I wonder if a filtered and localized stochastic awareness of news by chance and general diffusion isn’t a more efficient distributive mechanism than any news.

Although I do watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I’ve managed to cut all news shows out of my life. If I hear about an intriguing story I tend to google around for primary or local sources (ie: I read soldier blogs and Iraqi local blogs for news about the war, not newspapers) if I want a source.

As a result, unlike most of the people around me, I’m not convinced we live in the end times. I’m impressed with all the people running around just being human in all the various locales and on all sides of the various issues.

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