[Air-l] DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES
World Wide Web
www at utoronto.ca
Sat May 19 10:00:23 PDT 2001
Dear Friends,
I found the first story in here truly frightening -- and alas, fitting
some of the things I encounter around students (none working with me,
fortunately).
The other stories are interesting too.
This is the list of the Assoc of Internet Researchers.
Barry
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director
wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto
455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162
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From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman at bi.no>
Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES
Jack Lule uncovers seven myths that shape journalism. He uses the
example of Haiti to explain the unconscious racism of the U.S. press
The Myth In Journalism
05/16/01
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/lule.shtml
Jack Lule's book, "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of
Journalism" examines the difference between news as "information" and news
as "story" with characters, plot and theme. For Lule, myth does not mean
untrue tales, but rather great stories emphasizing "archetypal figures and
forms" and "exemplary models" that play crucial social roles for humankind.
In this definition, such figures, forms and models represent shared values
and help people better understand the complexities, good and bad, of human
life.
By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey Newton, Mother
Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire and Hurricane Mitch, among others,
Lule a great storyteller himself demonstrates seven master myths in the
news that shape our thinking about foreign policy, terrorism, race
relations, political dissent and other issues. He calls them The Victim,
The Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World
and The Flood.
As Lule writes in this selection, digital technology may either nourish "a
far-reaching medley of voices and stories" or else impose "the crushing
conformity of a few global scribes." He uses Haiti to illustrate the
latter, perceiving an unconscious racism in the coverage of Haitian
politics by The New York Times. Lule's reading is neither academic nor
literary but an insistence that storytelling, including its cultural and
social role, is crucial to the revitalization and survival of journalism.
Andrew Levy, ( Andrew at mediachannel.org), Editor
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World
Myth and
the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already
seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales
to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of
myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps
ominous, results.
The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be
dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever
franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some
scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society
rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload.
Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous
congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news
is only information, news is nothing.
Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the
throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple
with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which
they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long
played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in
the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained
the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the
stability of story in unstable times.
Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to
organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope
with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified
patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You
tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such
complex data, moving at very high speeds."
"So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal
need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on the
need for pattern recognition," McLuhan said. "It's a need which the poets
foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing
experience." And so myth and new technology offer opportunities to one
another. In a modern, wired world, the news provides pattern
recognition mythic forms of organizing experience.
State scribes stand poised to exploit these opportunities perhaps to the
detriment of society. Amid the chaos of the information explosion, the
authority of the storyteller seems likely to increase. In the din of a
million voices, the voice of an established storyteller, for better or
worse, attains even more status. We have already seen evidence of this
power in the infancy of online news. Dramatic events the election of a
president, a terrorist killing, a celebrity trial, a devastating
flood bring a rush of readers to the Web sites of traditional news
outlets, the established "brands," the state scribes.
And the power of the state scribes is being enhanced, politically and
economically, as they join together in huge global conglomerates. As
previous propositions affirmed, it's always been dangerous to have
storytelling power invested in a select social few. Power corrupts. And in
our times of consolidation of new and news media, the danger looms larger.
State scribes, long beholden to privileged and powerful rulers, now are
also compromised by their responsibilities to stockholders, corporate
owners, and even to other scribes to whom they have been married and
merged. It is a perilous world in which a very few voices, so compromised,
can signal to society what is important and what is not, how to act and how
not, who is worthy and who is not.
The Web, though, is terribly tangled. Myth and new technology may actually
pose threats to the state scribes as well. People are increasingly able to
seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the
state scribes. People have the ability to find others who share and confirm
their views of the world, bypassing the communication of the scribes.
=46or example, people with disabilities can find each other online and
organize to challenge their exclusion from positions, power, and print.
Political candidates unaffiliated with the two major parties have a means
to reach a larger audience. Hate groups, isolated in their own communities,
can seek support from around the world. What happens online in all these
different connections? People share stories. They sustain each other with
stories that draw from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary
models and meaning for human life. They tell each other news as myth.
Through these disparate online stories, the status of state scribes quite
possibly can be challenged. Digital technology thus has the possibility to
nourish a far-reaching medley of voices and stories or to impose the
crushing conformity of a few global scribes.
Myth, News Values And A New World
With the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new century, U.S. news
coverage of international affairs finds itself at a crossroads. For
previous generations of reporters and editors, the world could be organized
and explained in relation to the political, military, economic and cultural
rivalry of two superpowers. News values the criteria by which the news
media select, order, report and give meaning to events were structured by
this one dominant model, a model that has tumbled with the stones from the
Berlin Wall. Today, the questions facing [The New York] Times and other
news organizations include: How is international news to be defined in this
new era? What news values will guide the selection and shaping of events?
As we have seen, two models have emerged. One model has embraced the era as
a time of promise for journalism. This model valorizes aggressive,
progressive news values that promote social justice, and might be called
the model of "a new global and human journalism." Other scholars have
offered a more pessimistic model, a model of international news dictated by
the actions and initiatives of U.S. foreign policy. This model might be
described as promoting "Fortress America" in a world of chaos.
This chapter has offered a preliminary assessment of the prospects for each
model through a case study: the work of one Times correspondent, the
reporting of Larry Rohter from Haiti. Analysis of that reporting supports
the most cheerless view of post-Cold War news values. In the amount of
coverage, the nature of the content, and the strategies offered, Rohter's
reporting for [The New York] Times can be seen as working in concert with
U.S. foreign policy. Even as that policy shifted course rejecting the
junta, warily restoring Aristide, but insisting that he accept U.S.
policy so too did the reporting. Fears that U.S. foreign correspondence
would become captive to U.S. foreign policy were realized in Rohter's
reports.
To restate the particulars: The influence of U.S. foreign policy can be
seen quite readily in the sheer amount of Rohter's Haitian coverage. As the
Clinton administration made Haiti one of its first major foreign policy
campaigns, Rohter gave over most of his work for almost two years to
following Haiti. The Caribbean correspondent of the Times over some 20
months [from July 1994 through February 1996] filed, for example, five
stories from El Salvador, three stories from Colombia, three stories from
Honduras, two stories from Trinidad and none from the Dominican Republic.
From Haiti, as previously noted, Rohter filed 120 stories.
The themes of Rohter's reporting also worked in concert with U.S. policy.
Rohter's reporting did not stray far from U.S. policy perspectives. As the
United States prepared for an invasion to remove Cedras, U.S. officials
postured mightily through Rohter's reporting. Rohter's denunciations of the
regime and his chronicling of the junta's repression made a case for U.S.
intervention. At the same time, his depictions of Aristide as the rightful
leader, whose return would bring peace and reconciliation, also bolstered
the U.S. case.
When Aristide and U.S. policy soon began to conflict, Rohter's themes
shifted. The uplifting portrayals of Aristide and the lavalas movement
segued to critical accounts of intransigent ideology and radical leftist
politics. As FRAPH continued to terrorize the population and U.S. forces
refused to move against them, Rohter's avoidance of the U.S.-FRAPH
relationship shielded Times readers from the U.S. establishment of a
conservative "counterweight" to Aristide's progressive politics. And
Rohter's depiction of Haiti as an "ungovernable" place whose people were
not "culturally or psychologically" equipped for the demands of democracy
captured the patronizing and paternalistic attitudes that have driven U.S.
imperialism in the Caribbean for decades.
Haiti As The Other World
Myth provides another, complementary way to understand Rohter's coverage.
Like all reporters, Rohter did not have to create brand-new story forms to
report events from Haiti. He, his editors and his sources consistently drew
upon an established narrative an eternal story that helped shape coverage
even as it explained and justified U.S. policy. In Rohter's reports, we can
see the unmistakable structure of the myth of the Other World.
Underlying the reporting of Haiti's political turmoil turmoil orchestrated
often by U.S. policies is a classic portrayal. Haiti is rendered as a
primitive land, filled with danger and chaos, and ruled by death squads and
paramilitary patrols who leave the streets littered with corpses. Its
helpless people perversely admire bloody shows of force as they engage in
animal sacrifice and bone-stealing voodoo rituals, even on Christmas. And
they passively remain under the sway of rogue leaders and psychotic priests
with no respect for order or reason or privatizing industry. It's a
nightmare world.
Rohter provides us with a modern depiction of the Other World, one that
also seeks to define our society in relation to other societies. As
[Jean-Pierre] Vernant argued [in "Myth and Society in Ancient Greece"],
myth "expresses how a group of people in particular historical
circumstances sees itself." The myth expressed in Rohter's reporting
portrays a mighty and superior people descending with fascination and
disgust into a primitive place on the globe. The Other World is a world to
be feared and perhaps someday avoided. But for now it's a world in
desperate need of U.S. guidance and military might.
The Other World In U.S. International News
The Other World is not a rare
portrayal in U.S. news. Close reading of the Times and other newspapers
shows that reporting of international affairs often relies on the myth of
the Other World. In fact, many nations do not appear in U.S. news unless
and until they provide stories that allow the myth to be told. From around
the world, U.S. reporters and editors apply news values that judge other
nations newsworthy when they provides stories of bloody coups, tribal
warfare, perverse politics, strange customs and other tales of the
underworld for the U.S. audience back home.
Even a cursory reading of international news shows the influence of the
myth of the Other World on news values. We find stories about animal
sacrifice in Taiwan; female genital cutting in Africa; the stoning of the
devil at Mecca; a thwarted coup in Qatar; Central American drug warlords; a
military junta in Sierra Leone; genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo; stolen Aboriginal children in Australia; and many other dark tales.
Once again, we can marvel at the durability of myth. A tale told for
centuries is told to usher the United States into the 21st century.
Modern mythology, Joseph Campbell said, confronts an enormously complex
"fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated and assimilated."
U.S. society today faces an enormously complex "fact-world," a post-Cold
War world in which the United States is the lone superpower on the world
stage. U.S. international news confronts that world through tales of the
Other World. It offers coverage that affirms U.S. superiority and other
nations' inferiority. It provides scary, fantastic stories of a world beset
by anarchy and chaos. It promotes the "image of 'Fortress America,' an
island of civilization in a sea of political barbarism." It does all this
with a myth as old as Odysseus.
-------------
Jack Lule is a professor of journalism and chair of the Department of
Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has
published widely and has won numerous awards for excellence in research and
teaching. A former bartender, truck driver and reporter, Lule continues to
be an avid observer of the American scene and a frequent contributor to
newspapers and periodicals.
-------
This essay was excerpted from the book "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The
Mythological Role of Journalism," by Jack Lule (New York: The Guilford
Press, 2001). Copyright =A9 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford
Press.
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
School
+47 22.98.50.00 Telephone
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax
Home office
+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
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Message: 4
email: ken.friedman at bi.no
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End of Air-l Digest
Dear Friends,
I found the first story in here truly frightening -- and alas, fitting
some of the things I encounter around students (none working with me,
fortunately).
The other stories are interesting too.
This is the list of the Assoc of Internet Researchers.
Barry
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director
wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman
Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto
455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162
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Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 09:11:01 -0400 (EDT)
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Subject: Air-l digest, Vol 1 #10 - 4 msgs
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Today's Topics:
1. The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep (Ken Friedman)
2. Authors in their Sites (Ken Friedman)
3. Re: The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep (Steve Jones)
4. DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES (Ken Friedman)
--__--__--
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 07:05:29 +0200
To: <air-l at aoir.org>
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman at bi.no>
Subject: [Air-l] The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep
Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) 2001 The Washington Post Company
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html
Monday, May 14, 2001; Page C01
The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep
More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To.
Can We Afford to Write Them Off?
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Jeremy Spreitzer probably wouldn't read this story if it weren't about
him.
He is an aliterate -- someone who can read, but chooses not to.
A graduate student in public affairs at Park University in Kansas City,
Mo., Spreitzer, 25, gleans most of his news from TV. He skims required
texts, draws themes from dust jackets and, when he absolutely, positively
has to read something, reaches for the audiobook.
"I am fairly lazy when it comes to certain tasks," says Spreitzer, a
long-distance runner who hopes to compete in the 2004 Olympics. "Reading
is one of them."
As he grows older, Spreitzer finds he has less time to read. And less
inclination. In fact, he says, if he weren't in school, he probably
wouldn't read at all.
He's not alone. According to the survey firm NDP Group -- which tracked
the everyday habits of thousands of people through the 1990s -- this
country is reading printed versions of books, magazines and newspapers
less and less. In 1991, more than half of all Americans read a half-hour
or more every day. By 1999, that had dropped to 45 percent.
A 1999 Gallup Poll found that only 7 percent of Americans were voracious
readers, reading more than a book a week, while some 59 percent said they
had read fewer than 10 books in the previous year. Though book clubs seem
popular now, only 6 percent of those who read belong to one. The number
of people who don't read at all, the poll concluded, has been rising for
the past 20 years.
The reports on changes in reading cut to the quick of American culture.
We pride ourselves on being a largely literate First World country while
at the same time we rush to build a visually powerful environment in
which reading is not required.
The results are inevitable. Aliteracy is all around. Just ask:
* Internet developers. At the Terra Lycos portal design lab in Waltham,
Mass., researcher William Albert has noticed that the human guinea
pigs in his focus groups are too impatient to read much. When people look
up information on the Internet today, Albert explains, they are
"basically scanning. There's very little actual comprehension that's
going on." People, Albert adds, prefer to get info in short bursts, with
bullets, rather than in large blocks of text.
* Transportation gurus. Chandra Clayton, who oversees the design of road
signs and signals for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says,
"Symbols can quickly give you a message that might take too long to read
in text." The department is using logos and symbols more and more. When
it comes to highway safety and getting lifesaving information quickly,
she adds, "a picture is worth a thousand words."
* Packaging designers. "People don't take the time to read anything,"
explains Jim Peters, editor of BrandPackaging magazine. "Marketers and
packagers are giving them colors and shapes as ways of communicating."
For effective marketing, Peters says, "researchers tell us that the
hierarchy is colors, shapes, icons and, dead last, words."
Some of this shift away from words -- and toward images -- can be
attributed to our ever-growing multilingual population. But for many
people, reading is passe or impractical or, like, so totally unnecessary
in this day and age.
To Jim Trelease, author of "The Read-Aloud Handbook," this trend away
from the written word is more than worrisome. It's wicked. It's tearing
apart our culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their
future decisions on what they used to know.
"If you don't read much, you really don't know much," he says. "You're
dangerous."
Losing a Heritage
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who
cannot read them."
-- Mark Twain
One thing you can say for illiteracy: It can be identified, nailed down.
And combated. Scores of programs such as the Greater Washington Literacy
Council and the International Reading Association are geared toward
fighting readinglessness in the home, the school and the workplace.
Aliteracy, on the other hand, is like an invisible liquid, seeping
through our culture, nigh impossible to pinpoint or defend against. It's
the kid who spends hours and hours with video games instead of books, who
knows Sim Cities better than "A Tale of Two Cities."
It's the thousands of business people who subscribe to executive book
summaries -- for example, Soundview's easy-to-swallow eight-page
pamphlets that take simply written management books such as "Secrets of
Question-Based Selling" by Thomas A. Freese and make them even simpler.
It's the parent who pops the crummy movie of "Stuart Little" into a
machine for his kid instead of reading E.B. White's marvelous novel
aloud. Or the teacher who assigns the made-for-TV movie "Gettysburg"
instead of the book it was based on, "The Killer Angels" by Michael
Shaara.
There may be untold collateral damage in a society that can read but
doesn't. "So much of our culture is embedded in literature," says Philip
A. Thompsen, professor of communications at West Chester University in
West Chester, Pa. Thompsen has been watching the rise of aliteracy in the
classroom for 20 years, and "students today are less capable of getting
full value from textbooks than they were 10 years ago."
He adds that these aliterate students are "missing out on our cultural
heritage."
That literature-based past included a reverence for reading, a
celebration of the works and a worshipful awe of those who wrote.
To draw you a picture: Where we once deified the lifestyles of writers
such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, we now fantasize about
rock-and-roll gods, movie starlets or NBA super-studs (e.g. MTV's
"Cribs"). The notion of writer-as-culture-hero is dead and gone. Comedic
monologuists such as Jay Leno or David Letterman have more sex appeal
than serious fiction writers. The grail quest for the Great American
Novel has ended; it was a myth after all.
Where we once drew our mass-cult references from books ("He's a veritable
Simon Legree"), we now allude to visual works -- a Seinfeld episode (not
there's anything wrong with that . . .) or "The Silence of the Lambs"
(the movie, not the book). A recent story in Salon speaks of "learning to
read a movie."
Where we once believed that a well-read populace leads to a healthy
democracy, many people now rely on whole TV broadcast operations built
around politics and elections. Quick, name a Wolf Blitzer book.
Non-readers abound. Ask "Politically Incorrect" talk show host Bill
Maher, who once boasted in print that he hadn't read a book in years. Or
Noel Gallagher of the rock band Oasis, who has been quoted as saying he'd
never read a book. You can walk through whole neighborhoods of houses in
the country that do not contain books or magazines -- unless you count
catalogues.
American historian Daniel Boorstin saw this coming. In 1984, while
Boorstin was serving as librarian of Congress, the library issued a
landmark report: "Books in Our Future." Citing recent statistics that
only about half of all Americans read regularly every year, he referred
to the "twin menaces" of illiteracy and aliteracy.
"In the United States today," Boorstin wrote, "aliteracy is widespread."
Several of the articles in the report alluded to the growing number of
non-readers. In one essay, "The Computer and the Book," Edmund D.
Pellegrino, a former president of Catholic University who is now a
bioethicist at Georgetown University, observed: "The computer is simply
the most effective, efficient and attractive form for transmittal of
processed information. Added to the other nonbook devices like films,
tapes, television and the popular media, the computer accelerates the
atrophy of the intellectual skills acquired for personally reading the
books from which the information is extracted."
Reading for Bliss
Kylene Beers has talked about the evils of aliteracy for so long and so
loud, she's losing her voice. Today she's in the lecture hall of Oakton
High School bending the ears of 100 or so middle school teachers.
If someone graduates from high school and is aliterate, Beers believes,
that person will probably never become a habitual reader.
One of the few academics who have written about the phenomenon, Beers, a
professor of reading at the University of Houston, says there are two
types of reading: efferent and aesthetic.
Efferent, which comes from the Latin word efferre (meaning to carry
away), is purposeful reading, the kind students are taught day after day
in schools. Efferent readers connect cognitively with the words and plan
to take something useful from it -- such as answers for a test.
Aesthetic is reading for the sheer bliss of it, as when you dive deep
into Dostoevski or get lost in Louisa May Alcott. Aesthetic readers
connect emotionally to the story. Beers believes that more students must
be shown the marvels of reading for pleasure.
On this late afternoon, she is mapping out strategies for teachers who
hope to engage reluctant middle school readers. Teaching grammar and
parts of speech, such as dangling participles, is the kiss of death, she
says. "You don't want to talk about dangling anythings with
middle-schoolers," she says in her Texas drawl. And the room laughs.
Aliteracy, she continues, is no laughing matter. Using an overhead
projector, she explains that aliterate people just don't get it. Unlike
accomplished readers, aliterates don't understand that sometimes you have
to read efferently and sometimes you have to read aesthetically; that
even the best readers occasionally read the same paragraph over and over
to understand it and that to be a good reader you have to visualize the
text.
To engage non-reading students -- and adults -- she proposes reading
strategies, such as turning a chapter of a hard book into a dramatic
production or relating tough words to easier words.
She writes the word "tepid" on the acetate sheet. Then she asks the
audience to supply other words that describe water temperature. "Hot,"
someone calls out. "Freezing," somebody else says. Others suggest: cold,
warm and boiling. Beers arranges the words in a linear fashion, from the
coldest word, "freezing," to the hottest, "boiling." "Tepid" falls in the
middle of the list. This method, she says, will help reluctant readers to
connect words they don't know to words they do know. "Aliterates," she
tells the teachers, "don't see relationships."
Apparently, teachers don't always see the relationships either. Jim
Trelease is concerned that teachers do not read. The aliteracy rate among
teachers, he says, is about the same, 50 percent, as among the general
public.
There is some good news on the reading front, according to Trelease and
others. The Harry Potter series has turned on a lot of young readers and
megabookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, are acrawl with
people.
But there is plenty of bad news, too. Lots of aliterates, according to
Trelease, say they just don't have time to read anymore. "The time
argument is the biggest hoax of all," he says. According to time studies,
we have more leisure time than ever. "If people didn't have time, the
malls would be empty, cable companies would be broke, video stores would
go out of business. It's not a time problem, it's a value problem. You
have 50 percent in the country who don't value reading."
Like Beers, Trelease believes that youngsters should be encouraged to
read aesthetically. Reading aloud to children, according to Trelease and
other reading specialists, is the single best way to ensure that someone
will become a lifelong reader.
"Even Daniel Boorstin wasn't born wanting to read," Trelease says.
"Michael Jordan wasn't born wanting to play basketball. The desire has to
be planted."
Surfing Through Grad School
Trelease and Beers and others are scrambling for ways to engage
aliterates. For all kinds of reasons. "What aliteracy does is breed
illiteracy," Beers explains. "If you go through school having learned to
read and then you leave school not wanting to read, chances are you won't
put your own children into a reading environment."
"What you have to do is play hardball," says Trelease. He suggests
running public awareness campaigns on TV. "That's where the aliterates
are."
Trelease says we should try to eradicate aliteracy in the way we went
after tobacco. We should let people know, Trelease says, "what the
consequences are to your family and children if you don't read."
"Aliteracy may be a significant problem today," says Philip Thompsen.
"But on the other hand, a narrow view of literacy -- one that defines
literacy as the ability to read verbal texts -- may be a significant
problem as well."
Many of the messages that we have to interpret in day-to-day life,
Thompsen says, "use multiple communication media. I think it is important
to realize that as our society becomes more accustomed to using
multimedia messages, we must also expand our thinking about what it means
to be 'literate.' "
Olympic hopeful Jeremy Spreitzer plans to become a teacher and maybe go
into politics someday. For now, he's just trying to get through graduate
school.
He watches a lot of television. "I'm a major surfer," he says. He watches
the History Channel, A&E, Turner Classic Movies and all of the news
stations.
"I'm required to do a lot of reading," he says. "But I do a minimum of
what I need to do."
But how do you get through grad school without reading? Spreitzer is
asked.
He gives an example. One of his required texts is the recently published
"Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" by Robert
Putnam. In the book, Putnam argues, among other things, that television
has fragmented our society.
Spreitzer thumbed through the book, dipped into a few chapters and spent
a while "skipping around" here and there.
He feels, however, that he understands Putnam and Putnam's theories as
well as if he had read the book.
How is that? he is asked.
Putnam, he explains, has been on TV a lot. "He's on the news all the
time," Spreitzer says. "On MSNBC and other places. Those interviews with
him are more invaluable than anything else."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) 2001 The Washington Post Company
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--__--__--
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 07:05:36 +0200
To: <air-l at aoir.org>
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman at bi.no>
Subject: [Air-l] Authors in their Sites
Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company -- The Boston Globe
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/134/living/Authors_in_their_SitesP.shtml
5/14/2001
Authors in their Sites
Fans turned archivists use the Web
to honor their favorite writers
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff
The Web is the ultimate library, an assemblage of texts unprecedented in
human history. Within its virtual confines, one can even occasionally find
good, old, honest-to-Gutenberg authors - the kind who put words on paper
as well as screen.
There's one big difference, of course: On the Web, authors' writings
aren't found on shelves but at sites devoted to their lives and works.
The individuals who tend such sites may be the closest thing this global
library has to librarians.
Actually, as the three individuals profiled here demonstrate, "librarian"
doesn't begin to do their self-appointed vocation justice. Each is part
fan, part archivist, part technician, using the resources of the Web to
pay tribute to an author he or she loves. It's a unique joining of the old
fashioned with the up to the minute: for with these sites, as with
creation itself, in the beginning was the word.
Proprietor: Curt Gardner, 39
Home: San Francisco
Work: software implementer
Author: Don DeLillo
Address: www.perival.com/delillo
Began: early 1996
It was in college, as a computer-science major at Wesleyan, that Curt
Gardner first heard of Don DeLillo. Surfing the Web some 15 years later,
he was dismayed by how little he could find about the author. So Gardner
decided to try to come up with a site like the one he'd hoped to come
across.
''My vision was to create a place where the average DeLillo reader would
feel at home,'' he says. Gardner also had an aim that he describes as
''fairly grandiose,'' which is ''to essentially document everything known
about DeLillo.''
The contents of his site include what one might expect (reviews of
DeLillo's books, interviews with him) as well as what one might not (the
novelist Salman Rushdie reports on attending a Yankees game with DeLillo:
''He goes there with his mitt. He's up there for every fly ball.'').
Gardner doesn't find running the site to be at all onerous. During its
first year of operation, he recalls, he haunted the University of
California at Berkeley library system, tracking down material. Since
then, he estimates he's spent no more than two hours a week working on
it. ''It's a fun pastime,'' he says, ''and it puts me in touch with
DeLillo fans from all over. Almost daily I get e-mail from an
appreciative visitor, and I also get many postable items from people who
send me links.''
Gardner met DeLillo at a San Francisco reading in 1997 and sent him
printouts from the page. ''I respect his wishes to keep some things
private,'' Gardner says. ''But let's just say he gave his blessing to the
site.''
Proprietor: Richard Lane, 33
Home: New York
Work: editor, ''Dateline NBC''
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Address: www.pynchonfiles.com
Began: May 31, 1998
''I created the site out of a jaw-dropping admiration for the man,'' says
Richard Lane. Thomas Pynchon is an ideal subject for a Web site: a
famously reclusive author who has many fanatical readers interested in
any scrap of information about him they can come by. In addition, Lane
points out, ''The encyclopedic content of Pynchon's work lends itself
perfectly to the hyperlink format.''
Site contents range from photos of Pynchon as an 18-year-old Navy seaman
(and of the destroyer he served on) to the complete text of an obscure
report on public disturbances in Malta in 1919 that helped inspire the
epilogue to Pynchon's first novel, ''V.''
Lane sees his mission as ''providing a conduit for information that the
novelist isn't providing.'' Sometimes that can lead to a certain strain
on the conduit. ''There are foreign visitors who assume I'm [Pynchon],
others who wanted all his books and critical work sent along, gratis. And
soon.'' There was also a recent query from a prominent Web site wondering
how to get Pynchon to review restaurants. Lane, who has had no contact
with the author, could offer no help.
Such distractions are a small price to pay for the site, Lane feels.
''I've learned more by stepping on Pynchon's shadow than I ever could
have imagined from a novelist. The confluence of ideas and tangents that
merely thinking about his work induces is a great gift of which he should
be justly proud.''
Proprietor: Sandye Utley, 49
Home: Cincinnati
Work: administrative assistant, WCET-TV
Author: T. Coraghessan Boyle
Address: www.tcboyle.net
Began: Feb. 21, 2000
''There's such joy in his writing,'' Sandye Utley says. She was already a
fan of his novels and short stories when she met T. Coraghessan Boyle at
an award ceremony in Washington, D.C., 16 months ago. He accepted her
offer to set up a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page for the site
Boyle runs, www.tcboyle.com.
Utley came up with so many references to Boyle-related articles and
reviews she decided to set up a free-standing site.
''It could easily be a full-time job,'' she says, describing the site as
''a never-ending proposition.'' Contents run the gamut from audio clips
of Boyle interviews and readings to listings of his public appearances to
a recipe (in Dutch, no less) for Baked Camel With Filling, a dish that
figures in Boyle's novel ''Water Music.''
Utley estimates she spends $300 a year on tcboyle.net. The biggest
expense isn't financial, however, but temporal: the hundreds of hours she
has put into site construction and doing Boyle research. She doesn't
begrudge the commitment, though. She exchanges e-mail with Boyle, and it
gratifies her that he approves of the site (he described a recent
redesign as ''Molto cool. Very classy.''). Even more important, perhaps,
there's the sense of camaraderie the site inspires.
''The people I hear from are an intelligent, witty band of readers (some
of them Tom's own friends) who love the work. In sharing that common
bond, they all feel like my friends, too.''
www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/134/living/Authors_in_their_SitesP.shtml
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(C) Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company -- The Boston Globe
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--__--__--
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 00:16:36 -0600
To: air-l at aoir.org
From: Steve Jones <sjones at uic.edu>
Subject: Re: [Air-l] The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep
Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
Interesting coincidence, this story, given this obituary from last week:
CLIFF HILLEGASS, 83, founder and former president of "Cliffs Notes,"
whose study guides helped generations of students through literature
classes; he founded "Cliffs Notes" in 1958 with a $4,000 loan and
wrote the guides in the basement of his home; in 1999, he sold
"Cliffs Notes" to IDG Books Worldwide for $14 million; May 5, in
Lincoln, Neb.
Sj
At 7:05 AM +0200 5/19/01, Ken Friedman wrote:
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> (C) 2001 The Washington Post Company
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23370-2001May13.html
>
> Monday, May 14, 2001; Page C01
>
>
> The No-Book Report: Skim It and Weep
>
> More and More Americans Who Can Read Are Choosing Not To.
> Can We Afford to Write Them Off?
>
> By Linton Weeks
> Washington Post Staff Writer
[stuff deleted]
--__--__--
Message: 4
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 15:09:18 +0200
To: <air-l at aoir.org>
From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman at bi.no>
Subject: [Air-l] DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES
Reply-To: air-l at aoir.org
DAILY NEWS, ETERNAL STORIES
Jack Lule uncovers seven myths that shape journalism. He uses the
example of Haiti to explain the unconscious racism of the U.S. press
The Myth In Journalism
05/16/01
http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/lule.shtml
Jack Lule's book, "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The Mythological Role of
Journalism" examines the difference between news as "information" and news
as "story" with characters, plot and theme. For Lule, myth does not mean
untrue tales, but rather great stories emphasizing "archetypal figures and
forms" and "exemplary models" that play crucial social roles for humankind.
In this definition, such figures, forms and models represent shared values
and help people better understand the complexities, good and bad, of human
life.
By analyzing case studies involving Black Panther Huey Newton, Mother
Teresa, baseball player Mark McGuire and Hurricane Mitch, among others,
Lule a great storyteller himself demonstrates seven master myths in the
news that shape our thinking about foreign policy, terrorism, race
relations, political dissent and other issues. He calls them The Victim,
The Scapegoat, The Hero, The Good Mother, The Trickster, The Other World
and The Flood.
As Lule writes in this selection, digital technology may either nourish "a
far-reaching medley of voices and stories" or else impose "the crushing
conformity of a few global scribes." He uses Haiti to illustrate the
latter, perceiving an unconscious racism in the coverage of Haitian
politics by The New York Times. Lule's reading is neither academic nor
literary but an insistence that storytelling, including its cultural and
social role, is crucial to the revitalization and survival of journalism.
Andrew Levy, ( Andrew at mediachannel.org), Editor
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
As Myth, News Will Be Crucial But Conflicted In An Online World
Myth and
the new technology may seem to be an unlikely pair. But we have already
seen that myth has adapted to every storytelling medium from tribal tales
to cable television. The new technology is no different. The combination of
myth and online news, though, will produce intriguing, paradoxical, perhaps
ominous, results.
The information model of journalism, already in great disrepair, will be
dismantled by the marriage of myth and new media. News is losing whatever
franchise it had on whatever information is. Information is no longer some
scarce resource, a commodity that newspeople can cull and sell. Our society
rapidly moved from information explosion to information overload.
Information is everywhere. From online events calendars to live, continuous
congressional coverage, anyone can give and get information online. If news
is only information, news is nothing.
Yet information overload offers opportunities to news: as myth. In the
throes of all this information, the need for myth increases. People grapple
with the meaning of rapidly changing times. People seek out ways in which
they can organize and explain the world. People need stories. Myth has long
played these roles. Myth has identified and organized important events in
the lives of individuals and societies. Myth has interpreted and explained
the meaning of the past, the portents of the future. Myth has offered the
stability of story in unstable times.
Decades ago, Marshall McLuhan foresaw the increasing need for myth to
organize experience in the face of information overload. "You cannot cope
with vast amounts of information in the old fragmentary classified
patterns," he told literary critic Frank Kermode in a 1964 interview. "You
tend to go looking for mythic and structural forms in order to manage such
complex data, moving at very high speeds."
"So the electric engineers often speak of pattern recognition as a normal
need of people processing data electrically and by computers and so on the
need for pattern recognition," McLuhan said. "It's a need which the poets
foresaw a century ago in their drive back to mythic forms of organizing
experience." And so myth and new technology offer opportunities to one
another. In a modern, wired world, the news provides pattern
recognition mythic forms of organizing experience.
State scribes stand poised to exploit these opportunities perhaps to the
detriment of society. Amid the chaos of the information explosion, the
authority of the storyteller seems likely to increase. In the din of a
million voices, the voice of an established storyteller, for better or
worse, attains even more status. We have already seen evidence of this
power in the infancy of online news. Dramatic events the election of a
president, a terrorist killing, a celebrity trial, a devastating
flood bring a rush of readers to the Web sites of traditional news
outlets, the established "brands," the state scribes.
And the power of the state scribes is being enhanced, politically and
economically, as they join together in huge global conglomerates. As
previous propositions affirmed, it's always been dangerous to have
storytelling power invested in a select social few. Power corrupts. And in
our times of consolidation of new and news media, the danger looms larger.
State scribes, long beholden to privileged and powerful rulers, now are
also compromised by their responsibilities to stockholders, corporate
owners, and even to other scribes to whom they have been married and
merged. It is a perilous world in which a very few voices, so compromised,
can signal to society what is important and what is not, how to act and how
not, who is worthy and who is not.
The Web, though, is terribly tangled. Myth and new technology may actually
pose threats to the state scribes as well. People are increasingly able to
seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the
state scribes. People have the ability to find others who share and confirm
their views of the world, bypassing the communication of the scribes.
=46or example, people with disabilities can find each other online and
organize to challenge their exclusion from positions, power, and print.
Political candidates unaffiliated with the two major parties have a means
to reach a larger audience. Hate groups, isolated in their own communities,
can seek support from around the world. What happens online in all these
different connections? People share stories. They sustain each other with
stories that draw from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary
models and meaning for human life. They tell each other news as myth.
Through these disparate online stories, the status of state scribes quite
possibly can be challenged. Digital technology thus has the possibility to
nourish a far-reaching medley of voices and stories or to impose the
crushing conformity of a few global scribes.
Myth, News Values And A New World
With the end of the cold war and the beginning of a new century, U.S. news
coverage of international affairs finds itself at a crossroads. For
previous generations of reporters and editors, the world could be organized
and explained in relation to the political, military, economic and cultural
rivalry of two superpowers. News values the criteria by which the news
media select, order, report and give meaning to events were structured by
this one dominant model, a model that has tumbled with the stones from the
Berlin Wall. Today, the questions facing [The New York] Times and other
news organizations include: How is international news to be defined in this
new era? What news values will guide the selection and shaping of events?
As we have seen, two models have emerged. One model has embraced the era as
a time of promise for journalism. This model valorizes aggressive,
progressive news values that promote social justice, and might be called
the model of "a new global and human journalism." Other scholars have
offered a more pessimistic model, a model of international news dictated by
the actions and initiatives of U.S. foreign policy. This model might be
described as promoting "Fortress America" in a world of chaos.
This chapter has offered a preliminary assessment of the prospects for each
model through a case study: the work of one Times correspondent, the
reporting of Larry Rohter from Haiti. Analysis of that reporting supports
the most cheerless view of post-Cold War news values. In the amount of
coverage, the nature of the content, and the strategies offered, Rohter's
reporting for [The New York] Times can be seen as working in concert with
U.S. foreign policy. Even as that policy shifted course rejecting the
junta, warily restoring Aristide, but insisting that he accept U.S.
policy so too did the reporting. Fears that U.S. foreign correspondence
would become captive to U.S. foreign policy were realized in Rohter's
reports.
To restate the particulars: The influence of U.S. foreign policy can be
seen quite readily in the sheer amount of Rohter's Haitian coverage. As the
Clinton administration made Haiti one of its first major foreign policy
campaigns, Rohter gave over most of his work for almost two years to
following Haiti. The Caribbean correspondent of the Times over some 20
months [from July 1994 through February 1996] filed, for example, five
stories from El Salvador, three stories from Colombia, three stories from
Honduras, two stories from Trinidad and none from the Dominican Republic.
From Haiti, as previously noted, Rohter filed 120 stories.
The themes of Rohter's reporting also worked in concert with U.S. policy.
Rohter's reporting did not stray far from U.S. policy perspectives. As the
United States prepared for an invasion to remove Cedras, U.S. officials
postured mightily through Rohter's reporting. Rohter's denunciations of the
regime and his chronicling of the junta's repression made a case for U.S.
intervention. At the same time, his depictions of Aristide as the rightful
leader, whose return would bring peace and reconciliation, also bolstered
the U.S. case.
When Aristide and U.S. policy soon began to conflict, Rohter's themes
shifted. The uplifting portrayals of Aristide and the lavalas movement
segued to critical accounts of intransigent ideology and radical leftist
politics. As FRAPH continued to terrorize the population and U.S. forces
refused to move against them, Rohter's avoidance of the U.S.-FRAPH
relationship shielded Times readers from the U.S. establishment of a
conservative "counterweight" to Aristide's progressive politics. And
Rohter's depiction of Haiti as an "ungovernable" place whose people were
not "culturally or psychologically" equipped for the demands of democracy
captured the patronizing and paternalistic attitudes that have driven U.S.
imperialism in the Caribbean for decades.
Haiti As The Other World
Myth provides another, complementary way to understand Rohter's coverage.
Like all reporters, Rohter did not have to create brand-new story forms to
report events from Haiti. He, his editors and his sources consistently drew
upon an established narrative an eternal story that helped shape coverage
even as it explained and justified U.S. policy. In Rohter's reports, we can
see the unmistakable structure of the myth of the Other World.
Underlying the reporting of Haiti's political turmoil turmoil orchestrated
often by U.S. policies is a classic portrayal. Haiti is rendered as a
primitive land, filled with danger and chaos, and ruled by death squads and
paramilitary patrols who leave the streets littered with corpses. Its
helpless people perversely admire bloody shows of force as they engage in
animal sacrifice and bone-stealing voodoo rituals, even on Christmas. And
they passively remain under the sway of rogue leaders and psychotic priests
with no respect for order or reason or privatizing industry. It's a
nightmare world.
Rohter provides us with a modern depiction of the Other World, one that
also seeks to define our society in relation to other societies. As
[Jean-Pierre] Vernant argued [in "Myth and Society in Ancient Greece"],
myth "expresses how a group of people in particular historical
circumstances sees itself." The myth expressed in Rohter's reporting
portrays a mighty and superior people descending with fascination and
disgust into a primitive place on the globe. The Other World is a world to
be feared and perhaps someday avoided. But for now it's a world in
desperate need of U.S. guidance and military might.
The Other World In U.S. International News
The Other World is not a rare
portrayal in U.S. news. Close reading of the Times and other newspapers
shows that reporting of international affairs often relies on the myth of
the Other World. In fact, many nations do not appear in U.S. news unless
and until they provide stories that allow the myth to be told. From around
the world, U.S. reporters and editors apply news values that judge other
nations newsworthy when they provides stories of bloody coups, tribal
warfare, perverse politics, strange customs and other tales of the
underworld for the U.S. audience back home.
Even a cursory reading of international news shows the influence of the
myth of the Other World on news values. We find stories about animal
sacrifice in Taiwan; female genital cutting in Africa; the stoning of the
devil at Mecca; a thwarted coup in Qatar; Central American drug warlords; a
military junta in Sierra Leone; genocide in Rwanda; ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo; stolen Aboriginal children in Australia; and many other dark tales.
Once again, we can marvel at the durability of myth. A tale told for
centuries is told to usher the United States into the 21st century.
Modern mythology, Joseph Campbell said, confronts an enormously complex
"fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated and assimilated."
U.S. society today faces an enormously complex "fact-world," a post-Cold
War world in which the United States is the lone superpower on the world
stage. U.S. international news confronts that world through tales of the
Other World. It offers coverage that affirms U.S. superiority and other
nations' inferiority. It provides scary, fantastic stories of a world beset
by anarchy and chaos. It promotes the "image of 'Fortress America,' an
island of civilization in a sea of political barbarism." It does all this
with a myth as old as Odysseus.
-------------
Jack Lule is a professor of journalism and chair of the Department of
Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He has
published widely and has won numerous awards for excellence in research and
teaching. A former bartender, truck driver and reporter, Lule continues to
be an avid observer of the American scene and a frequent contributor to
newspapers and periodicals.
-------
This essay was excerpted from the book "Daily News, Eternal Stories: The
Mythological Role of Journalism," by Jack Lule (New York: The Guilford
Press, 2001). Copyright =A9 2001. Reprinted with permission of The Guilford
Press.
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
School
+47 22.98.50.00 Telephone
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax
Home office
+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
+46 (46) 53.345 Telefax
email: ken.friedman at bi.no
--
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
School
+47 22.98.50.00 Telephone
+47 22.98.51.11 Telefax
Home office
+46 (46) 53.245 Telephone
+46 (46) 53.345 Telefax
email: ken.friedman at bi.no
--
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