David Bollier

Originally posted at onthecommons.org

One of the more pernicious enclosures of the commons is the enclosure of time and consciousness. It’s pernicious because it is so subtle and rarely discerned. When commercial values such as productivity and efficiency become so pervasive and internalized, they crowd out other ways of being. Our very sense of humanity — full-bodied, spontaneous, spiritual — leaches away.

All of this was brought home clearly in a provocative lecture that I attended yesterday evening. It was called “No Time to Think,” by David M. Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. Levy gave a chilling historical overview of how American society has become enslaved to an ethic of “more-better-faster” and is losing touch with the capacity for reflection and intuitive thinking. In an overweening commitment to constant doing and making, analyzing and thinking (which, let us note, are important human activities), we can too easily close off access to an entire realm of consciousness that is at least as important, our capacity for reflection.

Levy’s research is focused on why the technological devices that are designed to connect us also seem to radically dis-connect us. As Levy puts it, “We now have the most remarkable tools for teaching and learning the world has ever known. How is it that we have less time to think than ever before?” Although our society supposedly prizes creative thought, it in fact gives little respect to the intuitive and the contemplative.

Marty Kaplan

Originally posted at The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

"Why aren't you talking about Michael Jackson more?"

The question, from a caller to Larry Mantle's KPCC-Pasadena public radio program "AirTalk," interrupted a discussion of the budget mess in Sacramento. Actually, it was more a wail than a question - a crack about the Michael mania that had hijacked the news media.

Ninety-three percent of cable news on the days after he died was given over to Michael Jackson, according to a study by the Project on Excellence in Journalism. At the start of the week, nearly a third of the stories monitored - 58 outlets, covering print, online, network, cable and radio news - were about the protests in Iran. By the end of the week, the velvet revolution wasn't the only story that had largely been abandoned by journalism. The economic crisis, health care reform, the energy and global warming bill: you'd need an FBI investigator to find coverage of them. Only Governor Mark Sanford's soap opera could compete, barely, with the death of the King of Pop.

By going all-Michael-all-the-time, cable news wasn't jamming this story down America's throat. Even though nearly two-thirds of Americans said last week that the Jackson story was getting too much coverage, the same HCD Research survey said that four out of five people were engaged by the Jackson stories they saw. If people were more interested in the president's trip to Russia than the singer's memorial at the Staples Center, then the news would drop Michael for Moscow in a heartbeat.

You can't blame audiences for the addictiveness of the Jackson melodrama. As stories go, the tragedy of Michael Jackson has everything: death, mystery, celebrity, pop, money, custody, revenge, sex, drugs and arguably the weirdest superstar in history. Shakespeare would have killed for a broth this rich.

The question for journalism, though, isn't whether people are interested. You'd have to be brain dead not to be interested; our synapses are hardwired to pay attention to that kind of stimulus. Instead, the right question for the news media has to do with proportionality, importance, judgment, compared-to-what? trade-offs and service to the public interest.