After almost six years, I moved my office out of the old Lobero Building last week. I was astonished by the amount of stuff I’d accumulated during that time — the papers, yes, but especially the books. I receive a lot of review copies, but I’m also guilty of buying too many titles. It’s a tough habit to break.

As I was disassembling the bookshelves and moving the volumes out to the car, box by box, I was reminded of a time I had done the same thing two decades ago, only then it was vinyl records, not books. That record collection used to take up a small room, but today I can fit all my music on a single hard drive. In the same way, the arrival of the Kindle and other electronic readers, coupled with incredible search technology like Google Scholar, have rendered much of my book collection dead weight.

It’s not just that books are going digital. Used bookstores have now migrated online, which makes it possible to track down and order an out-of-print book in a matter of minutes. And if that’s too expensive a proposition, your local public library can quickly scan the holdings of other collections across the nation and have a copy in your hands in a matter of days via inter-library loan.

What this means is that it no longer makes sense to own a lot of books. If anything, it becomes a real burden, as I discovered in the course of this last move.

It seems I’m not the only one contemplating the future of books. As we know, the publishing world is in deep turmoil right now partly as a result of our changing reading habits. Publishers are “feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses,” writes Brad Stone in the New York Times, “with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster.” 

But amid all the anxiety, there is also a sense of optimism about the arrival of the Kindle and other readers that offer a glimpse of the future. “Just this year,” Stone says, “new electronic reading devices have emerged from Amazon, Samsung and Fujitsu, while mobile phones like iPhone from Apple have flowered seemingly overnight into acceptable reading devices for many bookworms.” (See Is This the Future of the Digital Book?)

The question is whether this represents a gradual shift or a watershed event for the publishing industry. Many have been asking this question with a mixture of dread and fascination in recent months. Bestselling author Paulo Coelho put this question to the readers of his blog recently and it stimulated a flurry of interesting responses. See Your Opinion: Will Books Survive?

Another valuable series called “The Future of Reading” appeared in the New York Times last summer. It took up the question of how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. See, for example, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

What we’re all wondering is how this shift will it affect the way we do our reading and, more broadly, the way we make sense of information?

This morning, I ran across yet another interesting quote about the demise of the book: “The book, the most traditional means of preserving and communicating thought, has been for a long time destined to disappear, just like cathedrals, walled battlements, museums, and the ideal of pacifism.”

What’s remarkable about this quote is that it was penned not this year, or even this century. Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote these words in 1919. Museums are mostly doing fine, and the ideal of pacifism seems, thankfully, to be enjoying a renaissance. But it’s true, the book does seem to be on its way out. 

Obviously, Marinetti couldn’t have predicted the rise of computers and the wonders of Google, but he saw that the arrival of cinema as a powerful new art form was already beginning to transform the way we present and take in information.

I ran across Marinetti’s words in Richard Lanham’s fascinating and prescient essay collection, The Electronic Word. In the book, Lanham looks at the ways electronic text is changing the structure of communication. Unlike printed text which is fixed and authoritative, digitized text is interactive, dynamic, and capable of blending word with image and sound, he explains. The electronic word challenges the traditional concept of “text” derived from the printed book, and since printed books are still the cornerstone of Western culture, it also prompts a basic reassessment of the liberal arts and how they should be taught.

Lanham makes many important points in the book. He says, for example, that the most precious commodity is no longer information itself but rather the attention required to cope with it. In today’s digital society, we are confronted daily with a deluge of information. “Dealing with this superabundant flow,” he writes, is like “drinking from a firehose.” It means that how information is presented is critical. Digital text makes this point clear in a way that printed text does not. 

What Lanham does in the book is help us to get beyond the old argument of which is better — printed books or their digital equivalents — which is irrelevant in any case. He takes us a level deeper by asking a series of provocative follow up-questions. (More about Lanham’s book in my review of it here.)

And that’s the conversation we need to be having. The question, as I see it, is how to preserve and enhance the best of both printed books and electronic texts and make sure that we retain the essential qualities that make reading such an valuable — and, at its best, deeply fulfilling — activity.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observed that just as thought can corrupt language, so language can corrupt thought. “A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation,” he said, “even among people who should and do know better.”

Academic prose is the most obvious example. Many scholarly books are full of not only bad habits, but sentences — and sometimes entire paragraphs — that are completely unintelligible. Here are a couple of specimens I ran across recently:

“One should not draw the conclusion that ‘new nations’ may not be created or become viable, but rather, that the process by which this occurs is fraught with inappropriate borrowings from extraneous experiences. Legitimation of such new arrangements may be produced at the end of a gun barrel, but more significant is how pivotal elites play the major role in advancing or retarding the process.”  (Donald Warren, “Displaced Majority Politics”)

“There is no easy path between cold cognition of an overdetermined structural analysis and the hot cognition of misplaced concreteness.” (William Gamson, Talking Politics)

But even ordinary speech has become increasingly contaminated by meaningless language. If Orwell were alive today, I’m sure he would be fretting about the way many buzzwords and catchphrases are bandied around today that try, as he put it, “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

I’m thinking of verbs like “score-carding,” “leveraging,” “monetizing,” and “benchmarking,” for example. Media producers like to talk about “reconfiguring” and “repurposing” their “content.” Business leaders now make the case for “right-sizing the corporation” and making “internal staff-balancing changes.” There is no end to examples of this kind.

Australian writer Don Watson has a name for them: “weasel words.”

What is perhaps especially worrisome to me is how marketing language has come to infect ordinary speech. Everywhere you look, people have started using stock phrases like “pitching an idea,” “enhancing visibility,” and “making concepts stick” that come straight out of the advertising world.

This tendency is also reflected in the virtual obsession with “branding.” Now even individuals seem to think they need to brand themselves, whatever that means.

Take, for example, a book by Brenda Bence with the remarkable title: How You Are Like Shampoo. The book’s subtitle exemplifies the kind language that has become increasingly common, and apparently acceptable to many of us: “The Breakthrough Personal Branding System Based on Proven Big-Brand Marketing Methods to Help You Earn More, Do More, and Be More at Work.”

A recent variant of personal branding is the idea of 15-second marketing and the so-called “elevator pitch.” Authors, speakers, consultants, bloggers and other independent professionals are advised to spend time crafting a short spiel or pitch that sums up their “unique selling proposition.”

See, for example, Steve Pavlina’s 15 Second Marketing and ProBlogger’s Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog

It’s a tantalizing idea, and perhaps a fun parlor game, especially for hyphenated professionals who are cook-musicians, say, or artist-realtors. How do you sum up your professional identity in ten words or less, especially at a time when more and more people are working independently (or not working at all) and trying to stake out a niche online?

The trouble, of course, is that it doesn’t work very well. We’re human, after all, and no slogan or catchphrase can sum up what we do very well. And why should it? In order that we might stand out in a crowd? In order to be memorable?

Yes, some say that’s the key to success. But let’s face it, it’s also a kind of vanity. We’re so busy objectifying and packaging ourselves that we forget what it is we do, why we love it and how it nurtures us — and perhaps especially, how we can be useful to people and help them be more of what they want to be.

I like the organic approach advocated by people like Merlin Mann and John Gruber. In a talk at the recent SxSW conference with the deliberately buzzword-riddled title 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! they make the case for doing what you do well enough, and with enough passion, that it sells itself. Then you don’t have to.

I love the English language, but I don’t think we need to reform or preserve it in all its purity. It’s not about purging everyday speech of jargon and contemptible words. Rather, it’s about being mindful of all the subtle ways our own thinking is polluted by meaningless vocabularies.

As Orwell said, one can’t change the language but at least one can change one’s own habits. “And from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.”

I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the “Madonna painters” supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by appreciative passers-by and festival-goers. Using chalks and handmade pastels, the artists sometimes created works of remarkable majesty and scale. But the art was always ephemeral, vanishing with the first rain.

Today, the tradition of street painting lives on in cities across Europe and in a growing number of communities in North America. 2009 marks the 22nd anniversary of the I Madonnari Festival in Santa Barbara, California. When it started in 1987, it was the only street painting event of its kind in the United States. Today, the three-day event, held each Memorial Day weekend in the plaza in front of Santa Barbara’s historic mission, draws crowds of 25,000 or more from around the world. The art ranges from small chalk drawings by local artists to large-scale street murals by nationally recognized street painters. There is also a special chalk-drawing area for young artists.

I Madonnari is a fundraiser for the Children’s Creative Project, an innovative program that provides visual and performing arts education to public schools in and around Santa Barbara. At a time when arts education has been all but eliminated from school budgets, entrepreneurial communities have to take matters into their own hands. The I Madonnari Festival represents one of the more successful such initiatives — a community-building effort aimed at both making art and ensuring its survival in the local school system.

This photoessay brings together images from 2006-2008. Some of them are included in the cover story of the Spring 2009 Broughton Quarterly, a travel and lifestyle magazine.

View photos »

I had my first espresso in a backstreet café in Venice. It must have been 1985 or ’86. I had arrived on the night train from Zagreb, Croatia, achy from a long and sleepless night. I stumbled out of the train station and into a café and ordered a coffee. What I didn’t know was that “coffee” in Italian is synonymous with espresso.

It came in a white ceramic demitasse cup, gave off a strong and slightly sweet aroma, and was topped by a curious brown foam. It wasn’t what I expected, or wanted. What I thought I ordered was a cup of brewed coffee, black and unsweetened. But this was something else.

Not knowing any Italian and in any case too weary from a long night of travel, I decided to simply take the poison and let the caffeine do its work. I held the cup to my lips, took in the curious aroma, and had a sip. Then another. And then a third. The fourth sip finished it off.

It was a new and altogether unforgettable taste sensation — like taking in the essence of coffee in its purest form. This wasn’t just a coffee, it was an elixir. I was intoxicated.

It wound up being the first of countless espressos I had during my weeklong stay in Italy, and each one worked its magic like a kind of secret potion.

After leaving Italy and returning to Sweden, where I lived at the time, I started ordering espressos everywhere I could. It became a virtual obsession. But it was hard to find the kind of espresso I’d had in Italy. Even the fancy coffee houses outfitted with gleaming new espresso machines and serving Italian roasts seemed to come up short.

When I eventually moved to the States, getting a good espresso became almost impossible. Sometimes I would order a double shot, and the kid behind the counter would hand it to me with a frown on his face, as if to say, “Are you really going to drink that straight, without any whipped cream or syrup added?”

Sometimes I would happen upon a café that served a decent espresso, but it was so hit-or-miss that the same café, the same machine, the same roast, even the same barista often served me a good cup followed by a foul and poisonous one.

Starbucks prided itself on serving consistently good espressos, but the experience was never quite right: the shots were too small, the cup too large, and the flavor, well, mediocre and generally unsatisfying. Plus, I hated the pretense of it all — asking for a double espresso and having a barista correct me with “doppio,” as if I had committed some sort of ordering faux-pas.

Besides, the smell inside those Starbucks stores is off-putting to me, like a combination of burnt coffee and cough medicine.

At Starbucks, baristas still occasionally hand me a double espresso with one of those unforgiving looks: “Wouldn’t you like me to add some steamed milk to that?”

Then I found Espresso Roma café in Berkeley. It was like being back in Venice 25 years ago. Espresso at its best. When I first found the place, I went three mornings in a row. Every espresso was exquisite. Perfection in a cup.

Now I go there every time I’m in the Bay Area. I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and head down for the first cup of the day. The guys working the machines are a delight to watch. They’re like clockwork — fast, efficient, flawless.

The place is on the corner of College and Ashby. If you love espresso, go there. The Yelp reviews are mixed, but that’s not on account of the coffee. The place is loud and sometimes has dirty tables, single women complain about guys hitting on them, that sort of thing. Also, people are finicky about their addictions, and coffee is no exception. So it’s no surprise perhaps that reviews vary.

I still drink my espressos straight, unsweetened. A piece of dark chocolate goes nicely with it, but is hardly necessary.

It’s not an addiction exactly, but a weakness to be sure. And short of returning to Italy, I can’t think of a better place to indulge it than at Espresso Roma Café.

Over the past year, I led a fascinating research project for the Harwood Institute on a group of changemakers we call “public innovators.” We looked at who they are, how they do their work, and why they are one of the keys to bringing about the change we need in America’s communities.

Public innovators are stewards of change in the community. They are not quite civic leaders, not quite community organizers, and not quite social entrepreneurs, but something of all three. Their work is aimed at engaging people, catalyzing conversations, articulating questions and common concerns, and aligning people, organizations, and resources to achieve real impact.

Sometimes they are leaders in the formal sense — city managers, school superintendents, chamber of commerce directors — but just as often they are people whose only credential is a passion for change. They may be neighborhood activists, church leaders, nonprofit directors, schoolteachers, or simply concerned citizens.

What sets their work apart is that they are not just committed to advancing the common good but to serving as agents of meaningful change and lasting impact. They act as a kind of leavening agent in the community that helps to mobilize people from engagement to action on pressing issues.

My report on the study, just released, is called Public Innovators: Forces For Social Change and Civic Renewal. It looks at how public innovators see themselves and their work, how they think about change, what drives them to take on intractable problems, how they mobilize people and generate impact, and what keeps them going in the face of inevitable frustrations and setbacks.

One of the most significant findings was that the public innovators in our study made no distinction between the community and the people of which it is made up. If there is something wrong with the community, they told us, the remedy always has to involve people. It’s not enough to make structural changes or implement new systems in the community, in other words. At its core, the work they do is aimed at building relationships and developing people. It is about helping individuals grow, cultivating new capacities, and learning together.

They stressed again and again that change and renewal in the community is meaningless unless it is rooted in some deeper and more fundamental change in the human condition. For this reason, their work focuses not just on making change in the community — important as that may be — but on the deeper work of elevating and transforming people.

The report goes into further depth, describing ten remarkable individuals who are making change happen in ten communities across the country — exemplary changemakers who are defining a new kind of civic activism for our times. Please read the report, share it with others, and let us know how the ideas resonate. Download a copy of it at the Harwood Institute’s website here.

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — are back in the spotlight.

Al Gore was quoted in The Guardian yesterday, saying that he believes we’ve reached a “political tipping point” regarding global climate change and that “a very impressive consensus is now emerging around the world that the solutions to the economic crisis are also the solutions to the climate crisis.”

It was Gore’s first newspaper interview since the November elections in the U.S. Part of his optimism, he said, is tied to the willingness of the Obama administration to tackle the issue of climate change head-on — in stark contrast to the Bush administation. Evidently, Gore met with Obama in December to discuss some of the green components of the $787 billion stimulus package that was passed last month.

But he also attributed some of his optimism to what he described as a shift taking place in the business community. Many business leaders “are seeing the writing on every wall they look at,” he said. “They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years. They’re seeing the new U.S. administration. They’re seeing Gordon Brown and David Cameron both advocating dramatic changes here in the U.K.” In short, he said, more and more business leaders now recognize that addressing this global crisis will require “a change in business practices.”

He went on to say that he was hopeful an agreement can be reached in December when nearly 200 nations will meet in Copenhaged to try to seal a new international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol after 2012.

Meanwhile, another conference has just wrapped up in Copenhagen where members of the IPCC issued some fresh statistics — most of them deeply worrisome — about the state of global warming. Reporting from the conference, The Guardian’s George Monbiot says it’s now clear that the world’s policymakers have fallen behind the scientists and that global warming is already catastrophic.

Presentations by climate scientists suggest that we’ve underestimated the effects of global warming in three important respects, he says:

1) Partly because the estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took no account of meltwater from Greenland’s glaciers, the rise in sea levels this century could be twice or three times as great as it forecast, with grave implications for coastal cities, farmland and freshwater reserves.

2) Two degrees of warming in the Arctic (which is heating up much more quickly than the rest of the planet) could trigger a massive bacterial response in the soils there. As the permafrost melts, bacteria are able to start breaking down organic material that was previously locked up in ice, producing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. This could catalyse one of the world’s most powerful positive feedback loops: warming causing more warming.

3) Four degrees of warming could almost eliminate the Amazon rainforests, with appalling implications for biodiversity and regional weather patterns, and with the result that a massive new pulse of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Trees are basically sticks of wet carbon. As they rot or burn, the carbon oxidises. This is another way in which climate feedbacks appear to have been underestimated in the last IPCC report.

“The world has very little time,” IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri said at the conference after the new findings were presented.

George Monbiot says that it’s time to stop calling it “climate change.” Using a term like this to describe events that are having devastating impacts on global food security, water supplies and human settlements is like describing a foreign invasion as an “unexpected visit,” or bombs as “unwanted deliveries.” “Climate change,” he says, is a ridiculously neutral term for the biggest potential catastrophe that the human race has ever encountered. A better term, in his view, would be “climate breakdown.”

I think he has more than a point.

Read more:

• The Guardian: World Will Agree New Climate Deal, Says Al Gore by Leo Hickman
• The International Scientific Congress on Climate Change
• George Monbiot: Time to Change “Climate Change”
• Andrew Revkin: Why 2007 I.P.C.C. Report Lacked “Embers”
• AFP: Sea Levels to Surge ‘At Least a Meter’ By Century End
• Nobel Peace Prize 2007: A Photoessay by Scott London

(The photos of Al Gore and Rajedra Pachauri were taken in December 2007 when they arrived in Oslo, Norway, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.)

A personal favorite, this one shot at the Heat the Street Faire in San Francisco, October 2008.

Most people in the entertainment world are busy looking forward to the Academy Awards on February 22. But some of us are still looking back on the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which just wrapped up on February 2. 

The two events are not unrelated. The ten-day festival in Santa Barbara kicked off on January 22, the same day the Academy Award nominations were announced. As it happened, a surprising number of Oscar-contenders were already booked for appearances in Santa Barbara — either as award recipients, presenters, participants, judges, or simply as celebrities making an appearance. 

It’s a mark of how well the festival is doing that it consistently manages to spotlight the year’s most significant films, performances, and personalities, often way ahead of others in the industry.

Highlights of this year’s festival included awards tributes to Kate Winslet (who received a nod for best actress for her performance in “The Reader”) Penelope Cruz (nominated for best supporting actress in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and comeback of the year, Mickey Rourke, (nominated for best actor for his performance in “The Wrestler”).

Richard Jenkins, who also received a best actor nod, was joined by fellow Virtuoso honorees Michael Shannon, nominated for best supporting actor for “Revolutionary Road,” Viola Davis, best supporting actress for “Doubt,” and best actress nominee Melissa Leo for “Frozen River” (below).

It was my second year covering the event. Some more of my photos are gathered here.

My blog has been unusually quiet in recent weeks and months. I’ve been busy juggling several projects and it seemed as if all the deadlines converged at once. Frankly, my head has been spinning for the last two or three months.

What have I been working on? One project was a year-long study I led for the Harwood Institute that looks at what we call “public innovators” — who they are and why they’re one of the keys to bringing about the change we need in America’s communities. That report should be out very soon.

Another big project was the completion of a book I co-edited with Irwin Abrams for the Nobel Foundation. The foundation is in Stockholm, the publisher is in Singapore, Irwin Abrams is in Ohio, and I’m here in California. Getting us all into alignment was what you might call a global effort. This was a very interesting and rewarding, if time-consuming, project. The book should be out later this year.

Another reason why it’s been so quiet here lately — and I know you’ve heard this before — is because I’ve been needing to make some changes to the site. It’s cumbersome work. But I’m making behind the scenes improvements as time permits. Meanwhile, there’s much new stuff to add to the site in coming weeks, so please stay tuned.

THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM:
Or, How Americans Are Learning to Have More Interesting Conversations

A Talk at the Literary Society of Youngstown
November 14, 2008

Last week, America lost one of its most popular and controversial authors — Michael Crichton. He was best known for his suspenseful technological thrillers, like “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park.” But for me he’s best remembered as a media critic rather than a novelist. Fifteen years ago, I heard him give a talk at the National Press Club in Washington that I thought was almost as riveting as his “Jurassic Park” books. Speaking before the Washington press corps, he declared that the conventional mass media would be gone within ten years — “vanished without a trace,” as he put it. He likened the mass media to the dinosaurs he wrote about in his books and said that radio, television, and newspapers were “on the road to extinction.”

Michael Crichton was a bit theatrical by temperament and had a flair for making headlines. But what he told the press that day wasn’t idle media-bashing or doomsday forecasting. Most of us journalists recognized intuitively that he was correct. Or at least partially correct. His timeline was off, but not his diagnosis.

Here we are fifteen years later. The mass media are still around, but there’s no longer any doubt that the news industry is in deep trouble. I could talk at some length about the problems facing the profession, but I’ll name just a few. Take, for example, the fact that the number of corporations that control a majority of the media companies in the U.S. — and by that I mean newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, music, videos, wire services, and photo agencies — has shrunk over the past 25 years from fifty to just five: Robert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Walt Disney Company, Viacom, NBC Universal, and Time Warner.

In essence, big corporations have taken over what used to be small and independent news organizations. These conglomerates are run chiefly in the interests of profitability, not good journalism. There is nothing wrong with turning a profit, but over the past decade or two a bottom-line mentality has contaminated the industry and overwhelmed the logic of news reporting. The most obvious sign of this is that newsrooms have been forced to cut editorial staff at the same time as they’ve demanded increased output from reporters. Today the average reporter spends about one-third of the time on a story that he or she spent twenty years ago. Needless to say, if you take time away from reporters, you’re taking away their most important working asset. They simply can’t do their jobs properly.

In this commercialized world, journalists are no longer active gatherers of news, going out and finding stories, making contacts, and checking facts. Instead, they are processers of second-hand information, often the sort that comes over the wire from Reuters and the Associated Press — or, worse, from the PR industry. Increasingly, they churn out news without taking the time to check it and without asking themselves whether it’s even newsworthy in the first place. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the coverage of the entertainment world where courtesy photos and news releases are routinely dressed up and passed off as bona fide journalism.

Another problem that I’ve written about is a certain disdain for the public that has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Robert Darnton, a great and brilliant writer who used to work for the New York Times, has written wonderfully about how young reporters are socialized by the culture of the newsroom. He recalls how young reporters at the Times were urged to write their stories with an image in their mind of a twelve-year-old girl. That was the ideal “image person,” as communications theorists call it — the imaginary person for whom a story is pitched. Why a twelve-year-old girl? Because news should be presented and contexualized in a way that can be understood by even the most unsophisticated reader. But needless to say, when reporters imagine their readers as children their stories speak down to the reader. That’s what we see a lot of today: the news is not edifying us so much as dumbing us down.

This is also reflected in a subtle paternalism where journalists see themselves as “guardians” of the truth. They insist on protecting the public from what they consider dangerous or foolish ideas. They do this in very crafty ways. Sometimes it takes the form of a kind of chic cynicism. A story about an influential author or management consultant will carry the word “guru” in the headline, for example. What rational person would identify with a guru? Sometimes it takes the form of a point-counterpoint reportorial style where all views are immediately canceled out by competing views, leaving the reader unsure what to think. Another insidious approach is to describe a trend or idea, always and only, by its most kooky adherent or the most misguided experiments carried out in its name. A story about a popular author of self-help books, for example, will begin by describing all the groupies who show up at her talks, instead of attempting to represent her ideas in a coherent and meaningful way.

I think these approaches stem from a professional ethos — a largely unquestioned set of assumptions — that most journalists share. It’s typically passed down from teachers and mentors, and reinforced over coffee, at the water cooler, in meetings. The problem is that the reader, TV viewer, or radio listener has no real place in this worldview.

I remember a conversation with the editor of a major newspaper in the Midwest. He told me that in his conversations with editors and reporters, the average reader was often referred to, in his words, “as either a consumer whom we have to please in some way, or an idiot we can ignore.” What this tells us is that mainstream journalists aren’t really interested in engaging in a meaningful dialogue with the public. They prefer to simply fire salvos of information at people.

And not surprisingly, people are fed up. Opinion polls consistently show that reporters are held in very low esteem by ordinary Americans, somewhere just a notch or two above lawyers and used car salesmen. A poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times found that sixty percent of respondents thought that journalists had nothing in common with them. Only 26 percent said the press looks out for ordinary people. Journalism used to have a certain mystique. The trench-coated, hard-drinking reporter was at least a man of the people. But that era is gone.

When Michael Crichton predicted that the media would vanish without a trace, he wasn’t just talking about how news has become corporatized, or how reporters are engaging in “churnalism,” or how the public has come to distrust — and even hate — the media. What he was saying was that the mass media would disappear because they’re becoming irrelevant. And that’s what we’re seeing today.

A vivid description of just how bad things have become appeared in the New York Times this past week. In the words of reporter David Carr:

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline…. On Tuesday, the Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people. Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it. It goes on. The day before, the Tribune Company had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of the Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago. The Star-Ledger of Newark, the 15th-largest paper in the country, which was threatened with closing, will apparently survive, but only after it was announced that the editorial staff would be reduced by 40 percent. And two weeks ago, TV Guide, one of the famous brand names in magazines, was sold for one dollar, less than the price of a single copy.

Now I realize we’re in an economic crisis, one that’s affecting the news business every bit as much as the housing industry, the banking industry, and the auto industry. But what we’re seeing today isn’t a temporary ratings or circulation decline on account of the economy. It reflects a seismic shift that’s taking place in the media world — a fundamental reordering of the industry.

And it’s not pretty. Circulation figures are falling. Ad revenues are down. Magazines are folding. Newspapers are closing. Reporters are losing their jobs. And those who are managing to hold on are running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. So, for example, long-time reporters are retooling in order to compete with bloggers on the Internet who are half their age and willing to work for a quarter of the pay. They’re working longer hours with fewer resources and less support. So it’s a tough time.

But I’m hopeful, even in the face of somewhat grim statistics. For all the despair about the death of newspapers, the decline of radio, and the imminent death of local TV news, there is a transformation taking place. I see it as the rise of a new kind of journalism, one that will benefit us both as individuals and as a culture, at least in the long run. I don’t have a name for it. But I can tell you it revolves around something rather prosaic, namely conversation — the exchange of ideas, information, and personal stories that allow us to create shared meaning and common purpose. The next stage in the evolution of journalism, I believe, is one that revolves around the act of a conversation.

We’re rapidly moving into a time when the most interesting news comes to us not as reports or stories so much as dialogues, forums, and even threads. This isn’t just the result of new technologies which have pulled the rug out from under the news industry. It’s also the result of people wanting to participate in the making of meaning, of people wanting to weigh in and help shape the conversation. We’re no longer content to just take news sitting down, so to speak. We want to be a part of it. We want to respond, to engage, to act on what we’re hearing, seeing, and reading.

In the old days, news used to be in the business of delivering information to people. That was its primary function — and a very important one. But today, information is all around us. The Internet, satellites, cell phones, and other technologies have transformed our relationship to it. In a matter of seconds, you can find out just about anything you want, no matter where you happen to be on the planet. What this means is that news-as-information is no longer adequate. Today we require something more of journalists.

Most people in the news business understand this. They recognize that their most important function is no longer just to deliver information but to organize and make sense of it. In recent years, the news media have come to focus increasingly on analysis and commentary as a way of offering context and making news useful to people. But here’s the problem: ultimately, information is only useful to people to the extent that they themselves are engaged in making sense of it.

Good teachers know this well. When they stand in front of the classroom and lecture at their students, retention tends to be fairly low. But when they engage their students in dialogue and group inquiry, they tend to stay focused and actively involved. There is a term for this approach to teaching: the Socratic method, or Socratic dialogue. It traces back 2,500 years to the philosophers of ancient Greece. The Greeks may not have invented dialogue, but they introduced the idea that individuals couldn’t be intelligent on their own, that it was only by reasoning with others that they could uncover the truth for themselves. The Greeks understood that if two or more people were unsure about a question, they could accomplish something together they couldn’t do on their own. By questioning and probing each other, carefully dissecting and analyzing ideas, finding the inconsistencies, never attacking or insulting but always searching for what they could accept between them, they could gradually attain deeper level of understanding and insight.

This idea has powerful implications, especially for journalists today struggling to make news relevant, interesting, and, ultimately, meaningful to people. What it suggests is that they need to engage people in a conversation — that news has limited value if it’s presented to people ready-made. It must be participatory to be meaningful.

E.B. White famously said: “Democracy is a letter to the editor.” Well, today it’s never been easier to to talk back to the media. Practically every news story on the Internet now carries, in addition to a byline, an e-mail address to the writer of the story. But that’s just the beginning. We’re now seeing the emergence of a new media ecosystem, where online communities can discuss — and extend — the stories created by mainstream media. The Internet has changed the entire landscape. Ordinary people can now engage in participatory journalism, grassroots reporting, annotative reporting, commentary, and fact-checking — all of which the mainstream media then feed upon — developing them as a pool of tips, sources and story ideas.

Now that anyone can be a reporter or commentator on the Internet we’re seeing the emergence of a two-way exchange. People are no longer relegated to being passive recipients of stories and information, but can engage with it and making it work for them and their communities. The journalist now becomes a “forum leader,” or a mediator rather than a gatekeeper or interpreter. 

The rise of this kind of journalism on the Internet is a fascinating development because it resembles conversation again, much like the original journalism that took place in public squares and coffee houses a century ago. The underlying principles of the new journalism remain the same as they were then, but the technology is different.

Speaking of the public square, the mass media have been the one of the main culprits in the breakdown of the American community. We’ve become isolated from one another, from our neighbors, and from our communities. Instead of engaging with people in authentic face-to-face conversations, we sit around and watch TV. We watch pundits sparring on TV shows that claim to be news programs but are in fact little more than entertainment dressed up as serious journalism.

I believe, with a qualified optimism, that these same media can play a critical role in the restoration of community. I see a time in the not too distant future when the media will be imbued with goals and values that can reweave the strands of our social fabric. And, when that day comes, the content of news will look very different. There will be less sex and violence and more inspiring and positive examples. There will be less observation and entertainment, more interaction and participation. Less hand-wringing and blaming and more shouldering of responsibility. Fewer false choices and more true alternatives. More discussion and debate. More context, more spirit, more wisdom. But in order to fulfill this promise, the media need to learn to bring us together. They have to become the matchmakers, the conveners, and the community salon-keepers.

I’m hopeful. I’m already seeing the early signs of such a shift. And if the conventional media don’t survive — as Michael Crichton predicted back in 1993 — it’s not the end of the world. We’ll have a lot more peace of mind, for one thing. And for another, we’ll have to learn how to talk to people face-to-face again. That’s becoming a lost art, but one that’s sorely needed today.

Thank you very much.
 

When Richard Rodriguez entered first grade at Sacred Heart School in Sacramento, California, his English vocabulary consisted of barely fifty words. All his classmates were white. He kept quiet, listening to the sounds of middle-class American speech, and feeling alone. After school he would return home to the pleasing, soothing sounds of his family’s Spanish.

When his English showed little sign of improvement, the nuns at his school asked Rodriguez’s parents to speak more English at home. Eager to help their son, his mother and father complied. “Ahora, speak to us en inglés,” they would say. Their effort to bring him into the linguistic mainstream had far-reaching results. Rodriguez went on to earn a degree in English at Stanford and one in philosophy at Columbia. He then pursued a doctorate in English Renaissance literature at Berkeley and spent a year in London on a Fulbright scholarship.

Though Rodriguez had his sights set on a career in academia, in 1976 he abruptly went his own way, supporting himself through freelance writing and various temporary jobs. He spent the next five years coming to terms with how education had irrevocably altered his life. His first book The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, published in 1982, was a searching account of his journey from being a “socially disadvantaged child” to becoming a fully assimilated American, from the Spanish-speaking world of his family to the wider, presumably freer, public world of English. But the journey was not without costs: his American identity was only achieved after a painful separation from his past, his family, and his culture. “Americans like to talk about the importance of family values,” says Rodriguez. “But America isn’t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.”

While the book received widespread critical acclaim and won several literary awards, it also stirred resentment because of Rodriguez’s strong stands against bilingual education and affirmative action. Some Mexican Americans called him pocho — traitor — accusing him of betraying himself and his people. Others called him a “coconut” — brown on the outside, white on the inside. He calls himself “a comic victim of two cultures.”

Rodriguez explored the dilemmas of ethnicity and cultural identity more directly in his second book, Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. “The best metaphor of America remains the dreadful metaphor [of] the Melting Pot,” he wrote. The America that he described is a new cross-fertilizing culture, a culture of half-breeds, blurred boundaries, and bizarre extremes.

I spoke with Rodriguez about the dilemma’s of cultural identity and the “browning” of America in an interview that has been widely published over the last ten years. It appears in a new book, The Little Brown Reader, edited by Marcia Stubbs, Sylvan Barnet, and William E. Cain. It has also been given new life by The Sun magazine in a section online called “Favorites from the Archives.”

• Read the interview
• Listen to an audio clip
• The Sun: Favorites from the Archives

As hippie-mystic John Perry Barlow has pointed out, the Internet has a lot in common with the 19th century American West. It’s vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, hard to navigate, and up for grabs. Large institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to the point of sociopathy. It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty.

If you can appreciate the beauty and logic of this metaphor, you would no doubt appreciate what some innovative scientists and philosophers have to say about the evolutionary potential of social networking. The digital revolution, they say, has a lot to tell us about not only the emerging society of the 21st century but also the farther reaches of human consciousness.

One of the most compelling metaphors comes from physicist and philosopher Peter Russell who sees globe-spanning computer networks as part of an embryonic “global brain.” Extrapolating from recent theories in the fields of physics and geobiology, he maintains that the planet itself is a living system and that each person on it is a cell in a kind of global nervous system. As a species, he says, we’re advancing to the point where it will be possible for our minds to link together to create a collective human consciousness.

This shift represents “our next evolutionary leap,” he told me in an interview. Breakthroughs in telecommunications and computer networks are pointing us in that direction. “The interlinking of humanity that began with the emergence of language has now progressed to the point where information can be transmitted to anyone, anywhere, at the speed of light. Billions of messages continually shuttle back and forth, in an ever-growing web of communication, linking the billions of minds of humanity together into a single system.”

The global brain metaphor may strike some as more of a poetic vision than a realistic possibility. But when I asked evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris about this, she said that metaphors have an important place in science. To speak of atoms as little solar systems or as whirlpools of energy is to invoke metaphors, she pointed out. “Metaphor simply means that you take something that is familiar to you and use it as a pictograph or an image of what you are trying to describe that you don’t yet understand well.”

Sahtouris believes that Western science in the throes of a sweeping transition “from mechanics to organics.” In her book Gaia: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, she talks about the need for a more holistic perspective that recognizes nature not as a giant clockwork mechanism, as the Enlightenment thinkers conceived it, but as a self-organizing living system.

The beauty of the web, in her view, is that it exemplifies many of the characteristics of a dynamic living system. It’s based on equality, reciprocity, diversity, and local autonomy. One example of this, she told me, is “the way each part pays its bills and lets people from all other parts use its territory.” The Internet “has the potential for being the largest, most democratic living system humanity has ever created.”

When I asked Deepak Chopra how he sees the promise of social networking, he offered a more metaphysical perspective. In his view, the net is as a perfect metaphor for the “mechanics of creation.” As he put it, the basic conclusion of contemporary quantum theory is that the raw material of the world is, in effect, non-material. Many of our new technologies owe their existence to this fact. The invention of computers, fax machines, radio, and satellites were all made possible by understanding that the atom — once thought to be the basic unit of matter — is not a solid entity at all, but a “hierarchy of states of information and energy in a void of all possible states of information and energy.”

Put in its simplest terms, this means that so-called “objective” reality is not objective at all, but “a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup,” in Chopra’s words. This “field of all possibilities” is directly affected by impulses of energy and information. That is to say, thoughts are the raw material of the universe and therefore fundamentally shape reality.

New technologies such as the Internet and virtual reality furnish us with an excellent metaphor, he says, because they demonstrate “that reality is ‘virtual’ before it gets precipitated into a space-time event.”

While traditional scientists and other die-hard skeptics wave aside the idea that thoughts shape reality, there’s a growing acceptance of this view on many fronts. It’s part of a profound change of consciousness occurring in our culture, as bestselling author Marianne Williamson puts it. “You don’t have to be a spiritual seeker in California, you can be a businessman in Connecticut dealing with the revolution in computers. In other words, no matter what area of life and endeavor we’re in, we’re seeing the signs of a sea change,” she says. No one is denying that we’re moving into a new era in politics, in business, or in science, so “why should we deny that it’s a new era in terms of all human consciousness?”