News from nowhere

What Hacker News says

1. dredmorbiusAug 2024
   Addressing your other points:

   Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Arizona Republican (GOP) or American Federationist (labour / AFL/CIO).

   Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely followed publication of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-universally-purchased service.

   I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's Day at Night is an excellent insight into the state of US media at that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then:

   <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

   Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience development and narrative-fitting, remain:

   <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst>

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2. dredmorbiusDec 2022
   Journalism does several things.

   One of those is to inform and report. But in doing so, it almost always tries to fit events into an existing narrative.[1]

   And the existing narrative of the past decade-and-a-half of online systems, with very few exceptions, has been privately-owned, for-profit, walled-garden, advertising-supported social networks. Mastodon is sufficiently disruptive that "John Mastodon" was invented out of whole cloth to match the terrain to the existing map:

   Then, the platform removed John Mastodon, the founder of a competing social media company named after himself, for posting a link to the jet tracker's Mastodon account.

   <https://boingboing.net/2022/12/18/mastodon-users-embrace-col...>

   Note the mappings:

   - "John Mastodon" is created as a figurehead.

   - And as a "founder" ...

   - Of a "competing social media company" (itself three sub-mappings)

   I can understand how someone doing a sloppy hot-take could make those errors. But it also speaks to not having the narrative language to comprehend the reality. We don't understand what we don't have language for, "I'll see it when I believe it" also becomes "I'll see it when I understand it". That this afflicts those we rely on to tell the story is all the more problematic.

   (Camouflage works on a similar basis: <https://polination.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/animal-camo-l...>)

   I saw Newitz's comment and immediately replied (without checking the thread):

   By "impossible to use", what they of course mean is "impossible to use to monopolize, monetize, and commit massive fraud with".

   <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/109560464904178130>

   ... and quickly realised I was being anything but original on the thread.

   I've been in the tech orbit long enough to have seen multiple cycles of "tech is hard and can't be easily communicated", dating to the Apple II and Commodore Pet systems. By the mid-1980s, I was using uni campus Unix servers to write papers (formatted in nroff!!!) and communicate with my LDR grilf via email and talk(1) over a 56k leased-line network.

   I've seen mainframes, minis, PCs, the Internet, email, Usenet, FTP, the Web, Unix, Linux, mobile phones, smartphones, Twittr, and His Noodliness Knows What Else described as some esoteric geek-infused arcana up until the point it isn't.

   Two particular memories are of seeing a URL on a can of shaving creme ~1997, and of being in a bookstore (remember those) circa 1999 listing to a mother and young daughter talking about a new friend she'd met with her mother asking if they'd exchanged email addresses. Both were spillovers of my tech world into meatspace.

   Twitter ... has long been niche, relatively little-used, and fairly misunderstood itself. Searching phrases such as "I don't understand twitter" reveals many thousands of results. Facebook itself was largely niche until about 2010. Where both did become significantly adopted wasn't through argument, and probably benefitted relatively little from onboarding, but when they became where the conversation or interaction was, and people and organisations found that that's where they needed to be. Not necessarily everyone (I've avoided both), but a large and dominant fraction of online discourse.

   If Mastodon and the Fediverse become widely adopted, then it will be due to similar dynamics.

   And journalists will likely have found their narrative by that point.

   ________________________________

   Notes:

   1. A great book detailing this is Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere. It discusses the production of television news circa 1974, though much of the journalistic element applies to other media as well (including voice and video over the Internet). <https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst> <http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=14C940300F3D0EA68652013E...>

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3. dredmorbiusAug 2021
   Disclaimer: I've not specialised in media history, though I've been exploring it for a few years.

   You can find clear bias through sources such as I.F. Stone (active 1950s -- 1970s), or George Seldes (1930s -- 1960s, lived to 1995). Earlier muckrakers included Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and It Can't Happen Here, 1910s -- 1950s), Ida M. Tarbell (The History of Standard Oil, 1890s -- 1920s), and Lincoln Steffans and Ray Stannard Baker (both late 19th century / early 20th).

   There's a phenomenal interview with Stone from 1974 on ... Public Television's ... "Day at Night" programme: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g

   I've commented numerous times recommending Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909), a short book highlighting the influence of advertising on media. It's short, readable, fact-filled, and available at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

   Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) largely established the model for the "impartial press" (so called, only partially successful as such) during the bulk of the 20th century. It was based in significant part on Lippmann's own experience with failures of the news media in reporting accurately on the Russian Revolution of 1917--23.

   https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.126489/page/n1...

   Other authors I'd recommend would be Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (the title itself is a reference to Lippmann's work), Robert W. McChesney's many books on media, Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (cited in the famouse Google "Backrub" paper (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html), Neil Postman's Amusing Ourself to Death, and Edward Jay Espstein, News from Nowhere (https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret00epst).

   The last looks at television news as of 1971, including the numerous biases built in to the medium through narrative focus, budget constraints, and technological limitations, as well as the pace and scale of operations. Not all of those still apply, though some do, but it does remain a persuasive argument of how even incidental characteristics can profoundly influence a medium.

   For contemporaneous criticisms of television, see Edward J. Murrow's "Lights and Wires in a Box" speech, and Newton Minnow's "Vast Wasteland" speech, from the late 1950s / early 1960s.

   https://www.rtdna.org/content/edward_r_murrow_s_1958_wires_l...

   http://www.janda.org/b20/News%20articles/vastwastland.htm

   I've compiled a few further references concerning media generally in a "light reading list": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

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4. adonovanMar 2026
   > "what is the role of humans in a scenario where work is no longer necessary?"

   People have been fantasizing about this scenario throughout the industrial era--read William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) for example--but it has failed to come to pass so many times, and the reasons are pretty obvious. The benefits of technology are spread unequally, and increasingly so over time, so only a wealthy few get the option of a post-labor existence. Also, our demands for the products of labor change as labor productivity increases; we prefer (or have been persuaded to act as if we prefer) material riches over lives with less stuff and more time.

   We still haven't seen that AI actually replaces labor, as opposed to amplifying it, like a power saw or CNC mill used by a carpenter, so all these discussions about the end of labor seem like unwitting sales pitches for AI.

   > “what would be the role of humans in an AI-first society”

   The real question is why would anyone want, or want to help build, such an obscenity.

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5. dredmorbiusAug 2024
   Author here.

   Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics.

   On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise).

   On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all.

   At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere).

   One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated.

   There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.

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6. acabalAug 2021
   We were working on an edition of News from Nowhere for Standard Ebooks, which unfortunately never saw completion. But in the process we found scans of Morris's own first edition, which is truly an artifact of beauty: https://archive.org/details/Newsfromnowhere00MorrA/page/6/mo...

   Kelmscott Press was his own press, housed in his own cottage, where he produced books using a hand-powered press and hand-made paper. He even designed the ornamentals and the typeface!

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