Daring to look to the future

AT MY age and that of my other two co-writers on In Medias Res, looking ahead is no longer the act of hope and optimism. It is quite a painful thing to do because like others in the past who eventually became the older generation, our elders in the profession, our parents, I need to accept that my time is past, or its passage fast approaching.

As I still work, the insight is more discomfiting than it is for someone who retires from work. The situation poses contradictory impulses, a little too complex and personal to go into in this blog. Enough to say that working to make journalism as we knew it better and more relevant to the times, I have forced myself to look at change in the eye, think about its effects and the other less visible changes that go along with it. One must learn not only to embrace change but also to understand it.

So much of the change that changes life as we know it has been in communication, as technology has transformed the way we communicate, converse, keep in touch, we are changing in more profound ways, more than we care to admit. But the conversations about journalism in our country remains chained to a different age.

Even the younger journalists sitting as panelists at the Jaime V. Ongpin Journalism Seminar last week did not have a ready answer when asked by someone in the audience about a vision and a timeline for the future of Philippine media. There was obviously little time in the program to take up such a question. If there was, what would be the point to such an exercise? Any statement of vision and timeline crafted for even just the next decade would be challenged profoundly by the pace of technological advances, not only in communication but in other sciences as well.

Charlie Rose recently featured as a guest Dmitry Itskov, a Russian Internet mogul, who has developed cutting edge robotics. He recently launced 2045 Initiative to explore the possibility of transferring human consciousness into robots for those who wish to continue to “live” after their bodies perish. Playing God? Charlie Rose probed carefully into the ethical issues. Itskov pointed out that the ethical principle of a companionate God is to bring happiness to people. I felt pretty shaken by all the issues the conversation raised, wondering if I would be so afraid of death as to want to continue to live within a robot.

Journalism is being asked the same profound questions about its future. And the effect is the same on me.  I feel the ground I am standing on to shake somewhat.

To talk only about the crisis of journalism in terms of market changes and declining audiences gets at the earliest stage of the discussion which has been going on in the US and other developed economies where the Internet has wholly transformed the media environment. Internet penetration in these countries has had the kind of democratizing impact as to challenge the foundation of journalistic practice and consequently its usefulness to the public. It has made ordinary individuals mainstream sources and purveyors of news and information. The Press’ institutional function has been diffused by online sites and platforms. The change going on is structural and the response that tries to get back the audience is blind to its nature and meaning.

As CMFR developed training courses to improve journalistic practice in the Philippines, it focused on helping journalists understand the background of issues where change is taking place, because these were too complex to reduce to the formula of a news story. I often said, journalism needs to move away from the old conventions of news, which were formulated during pre-electronic and pre-digital periods of news – such as the focus on events, on prominent people, on the out-of-norm. To be really useful to society, to be that pillar of democracy, journalism needs to address the needs of an audience of citizens, not just consumers. It must try to explain more, provide more context, and get ahead of the story before it even happens.

I think all of the above would still be part of the shift that scholars see as required adjustment in journalism practice. Studies of these changes in the media environment now prescribe the fundamental rethinking of journalism. The essays and papers collected in the volume Rethinking Journalism (Peters and Boersma 2013) see these changes as evolving a practice that could be so different from journalism as we know it, moving it from the core value that we have learned to attach to the value of journalism in society. Could we still call it by the same name? I think its name is least of our worries. I am sure those that come after our time we will find a name that will work.

The more worrying point is – will it work as an instrument of citizenship and democracy?

For now, journalists in this country and those working in media development are caught in the middle and the in between.

The Internet is here and some 20 million Filipino “millenials” are hooked online. They are no longer reading newspapers nor watching TV news. But more Filipinos are without access to Internet. And a 13 percent of the population neither read nor write, along with others who never really gained the facility for it.

Newspapers are not about to disappear but there is reason to wonder about the business model as well as their institutional or philosophical purpose. Some are trying to compete still with a speed of scoops and draw readers with sensational news.

While we may lag behind in the digital shift,  we could use the time to to our own re-thinking as we look to the future and yet another brave new world.