Shaping media & the world
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By Deidre Pike
RSJ Faculty
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| Professor Langdon Winner of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute |
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| RSJ Professor Edward Lenert introduces Langdon Winner to the audience. |
Professor Langdon Winner of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute subscribes to DirectTV. Now and then, he said, he cruises through the stations, then gives the company a call. He doesn’t get to talk to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Instead he harasses the lucky employee who happens to answer the phone.
“Why isn’t there any news on the satellite?” he will ask.
A pause ensues while a hapless customer service representative checks his records.
“But you do get news,” the employee replies. “CNN, Fox,
MSNBC …”
“I rest my case,” Winner says.
Winner, an author, researcher and former contributing editor at Rolling Stone, spoke to RSJ students, faculty and guests Monday about the ethical dilemmas facing journalists in the high-tech age. Winner wore a long tan jacket over blue shirt and red tie—wavy hair brushed neatly back. Though the bright lights aimed at Winner’s lectern in the Linn Reading Room may have seemed overwhelming, they served a greater purpose: The RSJ’s first live streaming Web cast of a lecture.
With every new technological tool that comes along, Winner said, comes the potential both for social good and for misappropriation.
Journalism faces a credibility crisis as a few giant media conglomerates exercise muscular control over U.S. media. But Winner said he sees a window of opportunity to shape not-yet co-opted Internet technologies.
He quoted the penultimate lines of Faust: “Who ever strives with all his power we are allowed to save.”
In the classes he teaches at Rensselaer’s Department of Science and Technology Studies, Winner boils ethics down to two questions—questions for which he does not claim to have an answer.
The first is: “What kind of world are we making here?” And the second: “What’s my own role in this making?”
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| RSJ graduate student Ryan Jerz (behind the camera) shoots video to be streamed live on the RSJ Web site. |
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| Users from Texas to Wisconsin tuned in for the RSJ webcast of Langdon Winner's talk. |
The questions help students to imagine themselves on a large stage, acting out part of a drama. Students are forced into self-examination, asking: “What is my role? “Did I choose it or did someone choose it for me?”
The appeal of new technology can be intoxicating, Winner said. “And as new technologies are created and applied, there is the familiar expectation that democracy will improve, that more people will have access.”
But as with past technological advancements, like the railroad and radio, the same advances that serve news gathering and reporting can easily be turned into tools that harm rather than help.
Not long ago, Winner might have argued that journalists were doing their best to keep citizens informed and aware. That changed three and a half years ago when he watched Colin Powell give the now infamous talk to the United Nations, arguing for the invasion of Iraq.
“As I listened to Powell, I thought, ‘These are powerful claims. How good is the evidence to back them up?’” Winner looked to the U.S. news media for honest critique and commentary.
He was disappointed.
“The media bought his story lock, stock and unmanned aerial vehicle,” Winner said.
The result: An unwitting, misinformed public accepted a faulty case to justify war.
“There something rotten in the state of journalism,” he said, reciting an all-too-familiar list of complaints—media fixation with personalities, decline of serious investigative reporting in favor of Jon Benet Ramsey stories and the ideological overkill popularized by Fox News Network.
Winner ended up turning to the foreign press and reading a variety of blogs.
His advice to students and educators?
Get involved in the molding of new technologies, he said. While the window of time remains open, it’s possible to have a role in shaping software and hardware development, in designing the system that will ultimately emerge.
Finally, imagine yourself on stage, acting in a significant drama.
“This will require that you become a character,” he said, referencing legendary Rolling Stone music journalist Lester Bangs. “You all know characters—they’re impulsive, idiosyncratic … sometimes funny, sometimes a pain in the rear.” |
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