I’ve been reading a lot of media theory lately and at the same time immersed myself in social media as a content consumer and creator. The rise of web-based news and microblogging has increased the already disproportionate focus on breaking news, what’s happening now, now, now, and it seems to be exacerbating the effect of television news which is immediacy at the expense of context. I read one (possibly) tongue-in-cheek blog post in which the author said he didn’t care about what happened, he cares about what’s happening. This comment has been rolling around in my head for days and finally I remembered something Howard Zinn said when he was in Bloomington a few years back.

Speaking at the time of presidents Clinton and Bush (II) bombing so-called military targets, he reminded the audience that the U.S. government spoke about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same way. “If you don’t know history you’ll believe anything,” he said. And he’s right. In 2004, we knew that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were primarily if not exclusively civilian targets, but my history books never mentioned that the bombings were first justified with a lie in 1945. What does this have to do with Twitter, you say?

If we happily skip towards a news model that focuses exclusively on what is happening at the expense of thorough reporting, research, and context, we won’t really know anything. One day the world will be ablaze with news of the Australian fires and the next day, or that night even, the real-time news cycle will be on to something else. No one will bother to find out how the fire started, what the ecological or human cost is, if the fire is a symptom of a larger environmental or behavioral problem because who cares about eight hours ago? “I want to know what’s happening.” And that’s just as good as not knowing anything at all.