The next miracle (v11.1): Owen Youngman

Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Medill / Northwestern

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Monthly Archives: October 2009

How America was 2-1-3′d

Brett Favre or no, instead of ignoring Monday Night Football by reading or writing last night, I ignored it by watching a two-hour documentary on PBS.

temp_homepage_slideshow“Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times” (PBS companion site) (NYT review), a film by Medill alumnus Peter Jones, treads some of the same ground traveled by David Halberstam 30 years ago in The Powers That Be.  In fact, it leads off with a Halberstam quote: “No single family has dominated any major region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated Southern California. They did not so much foster the growth of Los Angeles as invent it.”

With 25 fresh interviews; access to a multitude of Chandler home movies and the L.A. Times archives; and an interesting diorama-like visual effect that imparted depth to collages of archival still photos, Jones and his team breathed even more life into an already larger-than-life tale of power brokering, Chandler self-interest, civic vision, and Times self-interest.  The PBS site calls it a “character-driven tale”; indeed, Jones is quoted as saying, “Revelation of character must anchor a film’s narrative trajectory. Character is best revealed one detail and one story at a time. We rely on evidence more than exposition.”

There are characters, all right, more of them wearing black hats than white. Truth be told, some of them are actually character-shaped holes in the narrative; while the film elicits wonderful sound bites from a few contemporary Chandlers in the non-Norman-and-Otis branch, they are mostly absent except when uncharitably referred to.

Harry B. Chandler

Harry B. Chandler

Which is not necessarily a problem. My early Internet colleague Harry B. Chandler, Otis’s son, was on camera extensively. He remains passionate about the role of newspapers and the importance of the Times (as evidenced in this November, 2006, piece written after the firing of Dean Baquet), and he lent a very human touch to a story so big that it broke the town called “this town” wide open.

Watching it reminded me again why relationships between the newspaper staffs in Chicago and Los Angeles were so fractious after Tribune took over Times Mirror in 2000.  (There was the time, for instance, when the editor of the Times told the editor of the Tribune that they couldn’t possibly run any stories by Tribune writers because “we’d have to label them as advertorial.”)  The Times both had built Los Angeles and had constructed a pervasive sense of itself as Maximum Leader, large and in charge, as the saying goes.

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Not dead yet

I’ve been reading and appreciating newspaper obituaries for years – learning interesting facts about little-known people, acquiring little-known facts about interesting people, and coming across plenty of variations on those themes in the process.

Most U.S. newspapers have two flavors of these written summaries of a person’s life:

  • the paid “death notice,” generally placed by a funeral home or a family to ensure knowledge of a person’s passing, and available to anyone willing to pay the fee; and
  • the editorial “obituary,” generally written by a newsroom staffer after someone has determined that the readership needs to know both of a person’s passing and of the life that person lived, and in practice limited in number by the amount of time and space available to the city desk.

Death notices often are the largest category of classified advertising in the paper after jobs, cars, and homes.  Like most kinds of classified content, they have begun to change because of the Web. Obituaries often are the most frequently searched items on newspaper Web sites if you combine all the search strings people use to try to find them.  Like most kinds of news content, they also have begun to change because of the Web.

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This is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.

My colleague Ellen Shearer posted a link to the Medill faculty listserv yesterday  about a recent academic study in Scotland with a headline-grabbing conclusion.  In fact, let me quote the headline from the Telegraph:

Facebook ‘enhances intelligence’ but Twitter ‘diminishes it’, claims psychologist

Dr. Tracy Alloway, from the University of Stirling in Scotland, did the study with 11- to 14-year-olds. It indicates that, more specifically,

Playing video war games and solving Sudoku may have the same effect as keeping up to date with Facebook . . . But text messaging, micro-blogging on Twitter and watching YouTube were all likely to weaken ”working memory.”

”On Twitter you receive an endless stream of information, but it’s also very succinct,” said Dr. Alloway. ”You don’t have to process that information. Your attention span is being reduced and you’re not engaging your brain and improving nerve connections.”

This matter of how the brain processes information is of great interest to many people. One of them is my former Tribune boss Jack Fuller, who in fact has devoted the last several years to this topic himself, particularly to the piece that explores how people absorb and understand news. Indeed, he has a book coming out next April from the University of Chicago, What Has Been Happening to News, that explores the topic in depth.

He allowed me to read it in typescript, and I won’t steal of any of its thunder now.  But more than two years ago, in a Tribune Perspective piece entitled “Reasoning With Feeling: Boosters of the Internet see it as a perfect forum for reasoned debate. But neuroscience tells us that emotions keep popping up,” he began to explore what he was learning.

Neuroscience came into its own at about the same time the Internet did. In the past couple decades, new techniques for peering into brain processes haveled to extraordinary advances in understanding the mind. These have profoundly refigured the picture that came down to us from philosophers and early generations of psychologists.

One area is particularly fascinating: The new model of the mind offers important but unsettling insights into why people respond to today’s media as they do.

The archived piece is worth a spin (though the parser that put it up on the Tribune archive site does a lousy job with word spacing every 80 characters or so). Essentially, Jack is exploring a different issue than the Scottish researcher: not the diminishment of intelligence, but the primacy of emotion “[w]hen the brain is challenged to process very difficult information – let’s say, multitasking amid an overload of information.”

Come the spring, you will want to read Jack’s book.  In the meantime, however, I guess I will feel good that I spend more time on Facebook than either Twitter or YouTube.

Though you could argue it might be a better demonstration of intelligence, diminishing or otherwise, to spend less time with both.