We have lived for the last decade in the age of information but as this new decade takes hold it is becoming clear we are now in the age of misinterpretation. With the rampant development and availability of technology we now live in an age where information (more specifically news) is no more than a few inches from our fingertips.
In the old days news came from one of two sources, our daily papers or our rolling news channels, most people would no longer extol the virtues of ether of these media sources. The belief that they are just not fast enough to respond or active enough to be accurate is widely accepted, but at the same time the emergence of social media and the resulting real time information it produces means we are left without the full picture.
How many of us on the morning commute investigate the storeys of the day may it be via twitter, facebook, blogs and news websites; on our ipads, iphones or our blackberrys? Recent studies suggest in excess of seventy percent of us are whole reliant on the information the internet provides.
The thing we don’t think about though is how big a picture we actually receive from these sources. With the average Briton losing interest at around the 483rd word, we now get our news in snippets rather than in swathes. Small bundles of immediately relevant data.
The idea that more people are becoming actively involved in their environment is a wonderful thing, but without the guidance and encouragement of our daily papers or our news channels are we really seeing the issues as a whole?
Communications specialists are beginning to realise very quickly the honest answer is No. It has become, because of the availability of instant and individually relevant news, a sheer impossibility to inform and keep the public informed of the evolution and causality of the issues.
This is not the fault of the individual or even the governing classes, it is merely the modern age. We must develop new techniques that allow us to feed complex and elongated issues to the public in the manner they want, but in an age where story and issue development can no longer be laid out clearly to the majority, how does the government keep them informed?
Gone are the days of lies and spin not because it’s not effective but because it is no longer practicable, instead the truth and the blog are the future. No longer can we rely on the journalist and the paper it is time for a shift towards the blogger and the online paper (and the interactive media it brings).
Communicating ideology or even just the issues of the day must be done in this age of misinterpretation with video and with pictures but we lay on uncertain ground. Democracy in this country must be held accountable, how though when it is no longer afforded an active or plausible method of right to reply.
Time and technology will and is creating new methods for governments to explain themselves but that is the fundamental issue. Time! Active accountability is possible right now through both the old and the new forms of media, but active response and reply is not.
The public have all the forms of new media at their disposal but the government does not. We live in a “democratic dictatorship” as Disraeli once put it and because of this the government are struggling to respond to a new age and a new era where everyone in this country can have a loud and active voice in their countries governance apart from those chosen to govern.
I suppose the result of this pondering would be an unsurprising conclusion, modernity and technology will transform the way this country is governed but until the process is complete; the voice of the many must not have too much effect on the decisions of the few.
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