A Pew study views news as inherently difficult to sell:

All these findings speak to the natural disadvantage of news content: Most news is covered by more than one organization and people do not place enough value on the difference between the various reports. In other words, if a user had to pay for a New York Times article on Haiti, evidence suggests that he or she would just look for another source that could provide the basic information. The nuances of depth or breadth in the pay story may not be valued enough to induce payment over a free alternative.

Maybe so. This is a car crash model of consumption: people want immediate, “basic information” about catastrophic events and would be equally satisfied by driving by it as by reading about it online. Obviously, sometimes true. But there are other problems. Most news is just not reported well, or in equal measure, or with any sense of conviction, which gets to matters of competence, selection and trust. Baldur Bjarnason:

If there’s one thing I learnt over the last three years and the tremendous news coverage that Iceland has been getting it’s that mainstream media is incapable of writing even one news item without getting something substantially wrong… Mainstream news isn’t worth £2 a week or a year because it doesn’t have enough facts to qualify as news and is too boring to qualify as fiction.

Here the biggest problem stems from the commodification of news, but manifests in frustrated consumption: news supplied by the mainstream media companies lacks “voice”—that embodied synthesis of:

1. authority,
2. reliability,
3. validity, and
4. perspective

that comprise the necessary conditions of believing what is told to you and wanting to hear it.

The frame of reference is the blind spot. If you understand news as an elementary information product then its consumers will appear to be acting instrumentally, snacking it quickly, grabbing it at the lowest possible price, or walking away from it at the slightest barrier. News appears to be nothing more of less than fast food.

But if, instead, you view news consumption as the search for moments of assurance—as willful participation in acts of telling, delivered by a “subject supposed to know”—then any kind of voicelessness amounts to failure. Not taking a position is abandoning the process that gives the product its value.

The best news sources are the ones that succeed at being “supposed to know.” Having the basic facts is not enough. You have to convey that you know them, so that we are not just receiving facts from you, but we are, first and foremost, being assured by your knowledge of the things you tell us. Audio, video, text, paper, screen—doesn’t matter—as long as we sense the guiding hand.

We want to consult the oracle.

Related posts:

• Big bad numbers
• Kids these days
• Triple J

As we plunge further into crises, of economics, democracy, environment and war, and the future appears less and less about infinite progress, I’m increasingly struck by the ways that we used to imagine the world of today would actually turn out.

View from the Twentieth Century

Take Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, page through some science textbooks from the 1950s, walk the passenger tunnels at Union Station in New Haven (pictured here), circle Eero Saarinen’s Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, or Paul Rudolph’s brutalist Art and Architecture building on Yale campus, explore Wesleyan’s CFA complex in Middletown, or stroll past the entrance to this hotel on St. Kilda Road in Melbourne.

We used to project where we were headed with Modernity in the way we built the city environment. There’s a dream of a better future, on a different scale, that seeps in as you spend time with these objects, images and places. There is a sense of optimism and the hope of a more cooperative sociality. I’m not sure that we do this anymore.

Entering the station building

A different future

In these ways we used to be more modern. In other ways, it was always a dream, an aspiration that was never achieved. Was it supposed to be? Maybe not. Looking ahead one thing seems certain: the Twentieth Century’s imaginings of Tomorrow will never come to pass, and the future is going to turn out to be a lot different than anyone predicted.

On the other hand, I don’t know from architecture. Never studied it. Of course, when has such a limitation ever prevented me from expressing a strong opinion? Perhaps you disagree…

Related posts:

• Ginza in the rain
• Ramifications
• Machine, rail and tree

• All points on the Prime Meridian are at 0° longitude
• All other points on the earth have longitudes ranging from 0° to 180°E or from 0° to 180°W…
• Unlike the parallels of latitude, which are defined by the rotational axis of the Earth, the Prime Meridian is arbitrary

It was an informative article — aside from all the venerable Greenwich Obervatory, historical import, British sea power ra-ra-ra — though I couldn’t shake the feeling that every time you said “arbitrary” you also meant “(but somehow so right).”

One thing I do like about GM, Ford, and Chrysler is that they are companies that still make something. What do the vast majority of the Fortune 500 companies even do? What does Goldman Sachs do? What do all those companies in Silicon Valley make? They shuffle paper, sure, transmit blips of binary code, attend important meetings, and make “deals.” Maybe brown people somewhere across an ocean will make whatever it is they’re selling or shuffling on paper or e-mailing each other about. But in Detroit, and in plenty of other industrial cities across this country there are still people making things without exploited labor, and believe it or not that still means something.

and this week:

It’s no secret that Americans don’t like to confront real issues of class. But I’m going to do it anyway. I think this ugly response to a mythology perpetuated about blue-collar workers is particularly shameful because so many American white-collar workers in both the public and private sectors are incredibly lazy themselves. God forbid a factory worker should step away from her job twisting the tops on the toothpaste tubes for a minute, but just because someone has a Bachelor’s degree that apparently entitles them to dick around on the internet all day with impunity.

I really like this blog. (Via Kris.)

Related posts:

• A time of bad debts