Survival of the fittest
Last night, BBC America ran a David Attenborough documentary on Darwin.
You probably could not run this on an American network, as it did not give time to ‘intelligent design’, but for the UK it worked quite well.
One of the points that Attenborough made repeatedly throughout the show was the unrelenting nature of evolution, driven largely by the vast number of offspring that most creatures (before mammals) gave birth to.
Even bacteria are able to survive and evolve because they reproduce millions of offspring, only the most adaptable of which survive. Repeat that over and over and you get evolution.
The bluefin tuna, pictured above, fertilizes an astonishing 1 million eggs for each viable offspring. It is understood that the vast majority of the fertilized eggs will simply not survive, but a few will.
In the world of journalism, up until now, we have worked on a one-to-one basis. That is, each journalist ‘birthed’ one story and nurtured it, hoping it would survive. A very mamalian approach.
However, in the world of the web, flipcams and twitter, we can begin to see the rise of an entirely different approach to journalism – the mass spawn of ideas and stories.
The coverage from Iran is perhaps the best example of what we might call Spawn Journalism.
The crisis fertilizes literally thousands and thousands of potential stories.
Many get killed off in the process, yet a few survive to maturity and to world-wide attention.
It would, of course,be literally impossible for any newsgathering organization to have as many cameras on the ground (not to mention as many Farsi-speaking reporters) as twitter, iPhone cameras and flipcams offer.
So what is coming out of Iran is not the definitive report from ‘Peter Jennings in Tehran’, but rather a massive burst and release of a stream of images and ideas which are making their haphazard way to western eyes and ears.
There is, in this, no one iconic piece or story or report that is the ‘Harvest of Shame’ of Iran. Rather, what we are receiving is a kind of overall impression of what is happening, on a real-time basis.
It’s interesting, and a new approach to journalism. All very different from what we have been used to in the past, but perhaps a harbinger of what is coming in the future, as more and more people get their hands on the technology that lets them put information, albeit in small bits, into the system.
There are, of course, disadvantages to this new journalism. There is no longer one defined ‘truth’, but rather many many small ones. There is no coherent ‘story line’ which makes everything nice and neat, but perhaps that is closer to the way that the world really works.
One thing I find most interesting is that like bacteria that reproduce with such fecundity, journalism will now begin to evolve far more quickly than it has since its beginnings. And like any good life form, it will evolve in response to the environment in which is fights for survival.
Whether conventional media companies who depend upon journalism for their survival will be able to keep up with the evolution of journalism itself is another story.
