In Praise of Scribes

“OUR SOCIAL TOOLS REMOVE OLDER OBSTACLES TO PUBLIC EXPRESSION, AND THUS REMOVE THE BOTTLENECKS THAT CHARACTERIZED MASS MEDIA. THE RESULT IS THE MASS AMATEURIZATION OF EFFORTS PREVIOUSLY RESERVED FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS.”

Recently I read Chapter 3 of Clay Shirky’s 2008 work, Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. The chapter is called “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” and it details one of my favorite debates: Who controls publishing in the 21st Century, and how should we define “journalist”?

Before I dive into it, I want to talk about another text Shirky references: Johannes Trithemius‘ Laude Scriptorum, whom I stole the name of this post’s headline from. Trithemius wrote his treatise – a public protest – in 1492, as he dismayingly watched the extinction of the scribe. Scribes, as you should know, were devoted monks who committed their lives to literacy and the art of writing. They were the sole publishers of their time, the gatekeepers of the old world, and all written words flowed from their pious penmanship.

That is, until the printing press came along – a monumental gamechanger. Literacy began spreading among the people, and while printed material wasn’t everywhere yet, Johannes Gutenberg certainly invented the wheel it needed to get there. 

Soon scribes were obsolete. Their only resources – literacy, the power to print – were being relinquished to the masses at an exponential rate they couldn’t possibly keep up with. It was a “democratization of knowledge,” or at least it was meant to be…

Johannes Trithemius, Abbot of Sponheim, prints his hopeless treatise in – what else? – a machine of movable type, and as that last plate slams down into paper, you swear the finality of that strike sounds like the last nail in a heavy, heavy coffin…

Lest we forget, the medium undermines the message.

So let’s think about the internet, as the newest and most controversial medium since television came around.

“Tell me how could you compromise yourself like this…?”

These are strange times. Some think we might be witnessing the dawn of a revolution – a revolution of the information environment, of media reform – that is riding swiftly on the wings of our latest technological innovation, that which we all know and love: the internet.

According to Shirky the professional community most affected by this invention is the journalist’s. So let’s quickly go over what he has to say about the journalist as a professional.

“Most professionals exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management,” he says. When you think of the resources a journalist controls, the first two that come to my mind are 1) information, of course and 2) publicity. Without this to trade off, the journalist is really in charge of nothing, and in fact can create nothing. Journalists, as the producers of these commodities, serve as the new societal gatekeepers who determine who and what make it into the information environment. They provide the public realm with the information they need to facilitate democratic dialogue.

Or they were supposed to, as the founding fathers argued.   

Shirky claims, “A professional learns things in a way that differentiates her from most of the populace, and she pays as much or more attention to the judgment of her peers as to the judgment of her customers when figuring out how to do her job.” As professionals, we begin, throughout our constant education and our interaction with others within our profession, to shape our world view in a way that relates to whatever it is we dedicate ourselves to.

The problem with this is that the professional outlook becomes a hindrance, one that can blind the professionals from seeing immediate changes in the structure of the environment they thrive in. In this case, Shirky argues that the media industry – and the journalists that fuel it – were late to understand the way their environment was forever changed, thanks to the influence of individuals like yours truly – bloggers.

The formerly closed circuit of controlling production, reproduction and distribution in the information environment has been blown away. No longer is the media industry the sole arbiter of information dissemination. Thanks to sites like WordPress, anyone and everyone can publish content for the public to assimilate – like I’m doing right now.

This, Shirky refers to as the mass amateurization of the media. The professional norms of journalism – things like deadlines, news cycles, notions of form and content, “objectivity, balance and fairness”, newsworthiness, and traditional ethics – have been obliterated by a mass of individuals taking the initiative to generate their own dialogue, and amplify their voice within the public realm.

Is this good or bad? Well, that depends on who you ask.

But the hat goes deeper. With today’s growing repertoire of communications tools, it’s becoming easier to network and spread information in a way that traditional media just didn’t see coming.

For example, I’ll refer you to my colleague Cody Pytlak’s blog, where he writes passionately about the Colorado Avalanche. From his sidebar, a reader can jump to other Avs writers’ pages, hockey blogs and even facts and stats on the great sport of hockey. Show me a newspaper or a television channel with this kind of referencing ability.

And my personal favorite, hyperlinking, is a powerful way to engage readers with tons of useful background information, without having to explain it all myself.

The thing is, the media industry knows that all of us amateurs publishing independent content on the web are lacking in a certain amount of credibility – but we are influencing our friends and close networks, and as networks begin networking with other networks and so on etc… You get the idea. My friends in the public relations industry already know this, and they’re way ahead of the curve compared to journalism and its owners.

The technology of the internet has shifted the ability to influence and persuade the public back into the hands of the public itself. As the printing press spread literacy, the internet is spreading publicity.

“Tell me how could you blame anyone else when you aren’t really committed…?”

But why are we even bothering? That’s the question I think is most important here. Traditional journalism created a vacuum in the public realm, in terms of democratic conversation. Jon Stewart knows this, and so far he’s one of the few to try and do something about it. Now, given the tools to make it happen, citizens have stepped in to fill the void – but I’m going to save that conversation for an upcoming post on citizen journalism and its positive and negative impacts.

Professional journalism, as it’s practiced today, is arguably doing serious harm to our democratic way of life. All you need to see to understand this is virtually any coverage of a political campaign or election in either Canada or the United States media. There’s no reasonable dialogue here, and the public is blatantly excluded from the democratic process.

Shirky says the question is “who should we consider a journalist?” and “who should enjoy journalistic privilege?” (As in the confidentiality of sources, for example). Well, that’s an entirely different subject, one that I hope to get to the bottom of with this blog. I’ve got a few ideas of my own, but they’re going to have to wait.

In the meantime, I’ll sit back and watch the professional journalist go the way of the scribe, and revel in the finality of my keystrokes and the sweet click of my mouse as I eagerly hit “Publish.”