First, the news. There’s not a lot left. We’re misled in Toronto because we still have four functioning newspapers but everywhere, newsrooms are pared or closed, journalists fired or bought out, stories go untold. This is wretched for democratic health. Other things, like shattered careers or profits, matter less.
It happened because ads, the main source of news media income, migrated massively to internet giants like Google and Facebook. So the government has introduced a bill (C-18) modelled on an Australian law, requiring big platforms that conscript stories from news outlets to “compensate journalists when they use their work.”
News media did an often wretched, but also often enough useful, job of filling that need, and to do it you need big resources, not piddly ones. No number of earnest, honest journalists with independent voices on Substack can properly dig into urgent subjects like Doug Ford and the Developers. They can comment on those but can’t generate them.
The point is the ads are mostly gone and the institutions are mostly (like Westley in “The Princess Bride”) dead. A government that cares can either fund news directly, like the CBC, or impose taxes and transfer the funds, or force the Googles to share with the news outlets, as the current bill does.
She said it can be statistically best correlated not with real world bummers like climate and war but with “the deleterious psychological effects of social media.”
This week, too, right wing U.S. senator Josh Hawley, tabled a bill banning kids under 16 from using social media. Ontario’s People for Education reports a worrying rise here in poor mental health among the young, though not linking it to social media.
Humanity’s existential baseline in the past was mostly to be alone, though sometimes not. You could be out with your flock in the field, or walking to the 7-Eleven at night for groceries. Nobody knew exactly where you were. If you saw someone yapping on the street, they were probably deranged. Now they’re just on their phone.
Now don’t forget how miserably alone adolescence can be. In that light, internet connectedness is a hope-filled potential resource — provided, to be sure, it isn’t a substitute for actual in-person interaction with those you care about. Maybe the role of the old(er) should be to remind the young, when it’s needed, of how important a balance can be, versus tossing them offline altogether.
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