The Story Isn't the Whole Story

A TED talk retold

Five years ago this month I gave a talk at TEDx Santa Barbara about what stories mean to journalism, and how they are also poorly understood. The video is here. As TED requires, the talk had a script, which I was supposed to memorize. While I didn’t follow it exactly (since doing that is not in my skill set), I stayed close. As usual for me, the talk was ahead of its time, which is now. That’s why I’m publishing the final draft of my script here. Note that the subheads, use of boldface, and italics are mnemonic devices meant to help me memorize the thing. I’m leaving them in because they might help you too.

JOURNALISM

Journalism has a problem. And because journalism has a problem, we all have a problem. That problem is knowing what’s true.

For a century or more, we relied on journalism to tell us what was true, and to do it in the form of stories. We went to hear those stories inside a vast theater we called “the media.”

Sitting as an audience in that theater held our culture together. There was gravity there: the gravity of agreement about what journalism told us was true.

Then the Internet came along and blew that theater up. The Internet did that by giving us all a whole new habitat for our lives and our work: a digital habitat where we’re all connected.

This is new to human experience, and very strange to us — and strange to our institutions. Because in the Internet’s digital habitat, there is no gravity and no distance.

There’s no gravity because the Internet is not really a place. You are either there or not there. And when you are there, the distance between you and anyone or anything else you engage, anywhere in the world, is zero.

The defining limits of media in the physical world — the walls that gave the media theater its shape — are just not there.

The Internet does away with what publishers call distribution and circulation. It also does away with what broadcasters call range and coverage.

Those are delivery costs that disappear in the digital world.

Now every one of us can publish or broadcast. Every one of us can forage for facts and report on what we find—to anyone, anywhere, who might be interested.

In other words, in the digital world, every one of us can do the job journalism did in the physical world, back in the old media theater.

But that job isn’t the same, either for journalists or for the rest of us. Because—

CORE IDEA

Now we are digital as well as physical beings, and we need new ways to inform each other about what’s true.

Ways we can trust.

We can’t trust the digital media business we have so far — the one that’s built on top of the ruins of the old media theater.

We can’t trust it because it is funded by surveillance-based advertising, which puts tracking beacons inside the private parts of our computers and mobile devices.

Besides massively violating our personal privacy, tracking-based advertising hosts a black market in fraud and malware and supports fake news by making prejudice pay handsomely.

It also tribalizes culture, so the old center journalism held together in the mass media theater is completely gone.

So who can we trust to tell us what’s true?

AUTHORITY

The answer is each other, and the place to start is here in the physical world.

We can do that right now.

Take a look at the people around you.

You’ll notice that all of us look different. We also sound different. This is by nature’s design, and by our own.

We are different than we were five minutes ago. This is because we are learning creatures.

And we learn best from each other.

When you tell me something I don’t know, I am not just informed by that. I am formed by it. You are an author of what I now know.

In this sense, we are all authors of each other. What we call “authority” is a right we give certain others to form us.

Journalism had that authority in the old media theater. It earned that authority by being honest and responsible.

We can do that too.

THE MONTECITO EXAMPLE

We had a great example from a few months ago when huge debris flows devastated Montecito, the town next door to Santa Barbara, where we are now.

Debris flows are rivers of boulders and mud that flow off the face of a mountain, like lava from a volcano, when a giant rainstorm follows a wildfire.

Many people were killed, many homes were destroyed, and many roads were washed out or covered in mud and boulders.

Nothing like this had ever happened before around here, in recorded history. And news coverage was limited while the town was evacuated, and rescue workers did their jobs.

But countless people stepped up to inform each other, using digital tools.

There were pilots and ham radio operators posting what they learned.

There were geology experts blogging helpful information about debris flows.

There were official reports by police, fire and rescue workers that were posted online.

There were survivors’ first-hand accounts on YouTube.

Public employees gathered data and used it to produce helpful maps online.

Traditional print and broadcast media also did their job, but that job was now contributing to a shared understanding, and not just telling a story.

THE STORY ISN’T THE WHOLE STORY

One clear takeaway from this experience is that the story isn’t the whole story. There are too many important facts that a story can’t tell by itself. That’s why traditional journalism isn’t enough — and frankly never was.

The whole story we’re in now is about how we all adapt together to lives that are both digital and physical, and how we rebuild the cultural center that we lost.

We can’t do that by turning our lives over to systems whose job is to spy on us. That will only drive us farther apart than we are already.

We can rebuild our civic and cultural center by informing each other like we did in Montecito.

That’s how we formed civilization in the first place — and re-formed it, over and over again.

Using digital tools for the good of our communities is how we become the best possible authors of each other, and of the culture we share.

Thank you.