News, civics and the Great Forgetting

We 'socially construct' the world around us through socialisation, schooling, workmates, friends and family and the media. We experience the world from a specific and unique perspective, and that is our individual 'reality'.

This story focuses on how the news media 'injects' a world view in to that reality, creating delusion more akin to schizophrenia than an approximate perception of cause and events. This phenomena is aided by the Great Forgetting, where history becomes the shallow ground of TV dramas and remakes of remakes.

The media is not the sole cause of belief or attitude formation; it is not the prime mover of how we construct our reality. It is one snooker ball amongst many, ricocheting and cannoning off other phenomena, in what I loosely call the ahistorical and post-modern existential experience.

When I trained as a journalist in Melbourne in the 1980s, we still called, without irony, reporting a 'consciousness raising' profession. It's a consciousness corrupting industry now.

The decline of the news is a thesis in itself but key cancers include the overt politicisation of the news, mixing opinion with fact, decontextualization, the extraordinary rise of supposition and 'life style' stories, an obsessive focus on the negative, mass sackings of journalists and many more.

People have turned off the news much like they've turned off cinema, cricket or Rugby League. They realise the media's interpretation of events and commentary by politicians, opinion leaders and celebrities, is simply a cluster of disassociated perspectives, aggregated for public consumption, which bears little or no relationship to lived experience.

When we juxtapose people's experience of unemployment, under employment, age prejudice, caring for ageing parents or loneliness, then the news doesn't reflect this reality at all.

Even though we are inundated with information, much of it is decontextualized, trivialised or like a paralysed cyclops, totally focused on Covid-19 infection rates.

The more one watches or reads the news, the less one knows.

History, which is oft mentioned but rarely studied, has a weird way of throwing up parallels with modern times. Towards the end of the reign of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (about 166AD), the first of the Germanic tribes crossed the Danube. A few made it over the Alps and charged around in what is modern day northern Italy, until they were pushed back.

In Rome there were rumours, hints and allegations, much investigation of animal entrails, persecution of Christians, wailing in the streets, holy processions and seers divining the future. No one knew what was going on. Today, the Germanic tribes would be called the Covid-19 virus.

The real problem though lay inside the gates of Rome. The empire had grown so large, it couldn't be administered properly. Those barbarians would be back. In the current context, they will come as unemployment and under employment, destroying the social fabric.

One of those snooker balls, bouncing off the cush, is the public domain itself. It's a societal space or forum where public discourse over the dinner table, near the water cooler, in cyberspace and in our heads, helps us construct reality – although inversely, it also helps ossify our rusted-on attachments to ideas, which may be invalid, incorrect or simply bonkers. But we hold on to them like a favourite teddy bear.

Today, the public domain resembles the attack charges of baboons in zoos, just before feeding time. It not only comprises 'the news' and political commentary, but also Cancel Culture assassins, anti-populationists, anti-vaxxers, 5G conspiracy theorists, celebrity victims of abuse, reality TV cooking shows and real estate porn, all making noise at a volume Noah would have heard on the Ark.

People now inhabit completely different worlds, which do not merely object to each other. They fail to comprehend how each other can even exist. There's no middle position, no finesse in argument. You chose which narrative suits you and stick to it with evangelical fervour. The result is to replace a political culture of disagreement with one of contempt. This is writ large in America, with the Republic the most divided it has been since President Abraham Lincoln.

These contradictory and polarising forces are arising during a most dangerous time, as the great liberal experiment, born from the American and French Revolutions is dying.

Trust in politicians, financial institutions, the media and the church, is at an all time low. Collective ideals such as equality and fraternity, which have been the bedrock of western societies and democracy for more than 200 years, buckle beneath our feet.

Now a new phenomenon has arisen and it manifests itself more like Alzheimer's Disease. I call it the Great Forgetting.

Living in these post-modern, relativist and ahistorical times, much of our daily tasks are performed by mobile phones and computers. There is little need to remember phone numbers, addresses or understand sentence tenses (grammar check will do that). We've contracted our memory out to hard drives but that's only part of it.

The Great Forgetting is the ever present, present where like dandelion seeds, we have floated free from the cause and event of history, it's documents and interpretations and it's knock-on effects through the generations. Instead of exploring commonalities, we have consigned history, it's lessons and warnings, to the back blocks of cyberspace or Hollywood remakes of remakes.

One of the strangest phenomena living in these post-fact times, is trying to remember what happened last week, let alone the terrible recession and unemployment of 1991 or the GFC of 2008, which still enervates the economy today.

The news media has trained us to think in discrete or singular events ('and now this') and not on the culminative effects of rolling recessions, the GFC and now the government-induced Covid-19 recession, which has crushed whole sectors of the Australian economy.

I have predominantly focused on problems with the news media but these issues won't be stopped by turning off the TV or shutting down the Internet. The barbarians are on the loose and they are us.