Previously in The Content Technologist:
Techno-optimism vs. legacy media. A history of impressions. How transformers process language and memory. Local media succeeds at telling local stories. The news audience, as processed by Palantir.
Rethinking our memories of record
An American news story, in its purest form, has no memory. Its provenance is both in its sourcing of human intelligence and in its observation of either situation or review of documentation. An American news story stacks facts but keeps no score; builds a narrative but predicts no future; guides judgment but obscures the narrator. If life is a rich, intricately woven tapestry, a news story is an intermediate crochet pattern hastily executed, loosely hooked. It stands alone, like the cheese, sweating in the heat until you have to throw it out. An American news story is an ephemeral commodity, borne of 20th century manufacturing, designed and refined over time to wrap fish and make pulp.
In the newspaper and broadcast days, it was the responsibility of the audience to remember the driving beats of the narrative. Readers could only access exclusive information from the papers they paid for, on the day it was published. Historians and researchers could review the trajectory of a story in microfiche or microfilm, and journalists could review the morgue of stories at their own brand, but consumers didn't care to track narrative shifts day-to-day. We were all beholden to the ride.
The medium changes but the method persists
Digital media transformed news from a daily habit into a semi-persistent presence, where past and current stories on the same topic interconnect. Whether compared in a search result or linked internally, news stories evolved from standalone narratives to connected discourse. Or, at least the consumption of news became more connected, more easily trackable.
But the format persists: from daily news to magazine features, the story is self-contained. State Fair coverage in the Star Tribune renews daily, as if the fair didn't exist the previous day or the previous year.
When the scope widens, the story format scales, to a point. Emily Witt's New Yorker article "What Happened in Minneapolis" barrels through nine months' worth of facts, anchored with the voices of protestors, culminating at May Day in Powderhorn Park. It's thoroughly reported and beautifully written, but the print constrains the detail, and years of organizing history are compressed into a single paragraph, and the recent aftermath of George Floyd's murder is summarized in a clause. Witnesses become characters. The "defund the police" protest in the Powderhorn basin is conspicuously absent, as is Palantir's tech, a choice that frames the story more tightly than the continuum I recall. The feature constructs a moment but doesn't capture memory.
The medium has changed, but the production of news content operates more or less the same as it did 50 years ago: every individual article has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Links to additional source material, when provided, add context but rarely weave in competing perspectives. If a fact does not serve the story's frame, it is cut for clarity. Memory of the source material remains in the brains of the journalists and editors who worked through the piece. Memory of the narrative remains in the brain of the consumer. Whether anyone remembers the nuances accurately a week after publication is entirely dependent on human nature.
Reading the story versus remembering the day
If you experienced the event, of course, memory works differently. It augments a story's coherence with anecdotal tangents, sensual modifiers, and corporeal scorekeeping. I can speak on this with some authority, as living near the epicenter of a global news event has become an unfortunate recurrence these past 25 years. I've either lived through three or four or five, not counting the 2020 Pandemic, depending on how you define "global news event." The three worst ones follow familiar beats: the catalyst hits you where you live, and scads of fuses light. For moments or hours you suspend disbelief. Humans scream, and neuroplasticity kicks in, followed by the fear. Then you start looking out for yourself and the people around you. And there is a video.
What the new language calls "processing" tapers out over a few months. Your brain revisits the worst of it, incorporating new details from the news and from your environment. You feel guilt, grief, knowing you weren't nearly close enough to experience the worst. You develop a new intimacy with neighbors, friends, roommates who saw and heard the same.
The "Average American," or the mass news audience, cannot understand your sense memories, even though they want to believe that they do. They saw it on a screen, which for a certain type of perpetually fearful American means that they believe they felt the same things you did. Later, they'll pick up a national magazine in an airport, they're charmed by the writing, and they'll begin romanticizing it. They'll think about what they were doing at the time it happened, and how they were heartbroken.
Heartbreak or trauma?
A common trope in media studies are flashbulb memories, or those moments audiences were supposed to experience at once, in monoculture: a moon landing, an assassination or two, the MASH finale. Flashbulb memories are reserved for a certain caliber of major news story, a single real-time event that interrupts the day. No one says "where were you when you heard about the Jonestown massacre?" But the Challenger Explosion makes the list.
When asked about flashbulb moments, people are more sharply able to recall where they were and who they were with when they heard the news. They feel empathy with everyone else whose heart broke at the same exact moment in time. But they don't know what a tank on their street looks like, or the smell of cities burning, or ash in the air.
For a long time, I dreaded the 9/11 anniversary because I'd have to watch the video again, in the company of people who only saw it on TV. I never want to go into how it felt watching the tv in my best friend's dorm room, watching the clip over and over and over again after hearing it outside a few hours earlier.
It's hard to convince someone who believes they share your experience that they do not, that they can't, no matter how well-informed or well-read they are. Often people will try to rationalize the senseless violence—"sometimes planes crash into buildings for a reason" is one I remember—when you're too shocked to assume meaning. Reading the collective record is cold comfort. When you heard the whole thing happen, a tightly written news recap feels incredibly thin. A video is too much. Little exists in between.
Doing more with the tools in our hands
The web, creator media, and LLMs have brought the potential to develop new shades of memory for news. We have the capability to weave stronger connections to hold more than the daily catch. But so far they've enabled amateur conspiracy theorists to stew on what-ifs, invented a whole new pantheon of heroes and villains to conjure more violence, and empowered a glut of metapundits to summarize reported summaries and dismiss the human details. They've also encouraged the uniquely terrifying capacity for revisiting a previous interpretation of a news story, one that by all traditional editorial standards would be out of the cycle, and twisting it into new violence. Despite the infinite scroll, digital media has only democratized the views of those who stoop to pander to the powerful, or to those beast-feeding dilettantes who fester in the remnants of the coddled, curdled "culture."
I wonder how, in 25 years, the mass American audience will remember where we were when we heard George Floyd was killed, when Renee Good was killed, when Alex Pretti was killed. Will it be a defining moment for the Average American audience, or barely a blip? What's the version of the flashbulb memory for a social media algorithm, for the weirdly selective and over-literal memory of a chatbot, for whatever "AGI" pops up down the road? Will we still rely on the legacy features that bind events in the mechanics of print, or will we build a news form that's more cohesive, collective, and human from the sources who were there the whole time?
As a builder of information systems, I have to believe we can do better, that we will do more with new structures than selling ads to robots, panicking about originality, closing off access to necessary information, and slouching toward others' algorithms, and fussing about who owns the facts. But maybe that's just how I'm telling the story this year.
Unless more news inserts itself into my neighborhood, this concludes a series of essays I've been considering "the trauma dump." In the coming weeks, in between client work, I'm hoping to write here less about news and more about software. So if you're super tired of hearing about Minneapolis, you're in luck. But if you want to read more personal work, stay tuned for an upcoming project. It's been a rough one, but I still have tricks up my sleeve.
–DC
Content tech links of the week
- Rebecca Solnit on news and memory, in the context of understanding violence against women.
- Poynter is launching a program for free digital preservation training for local newsrooms. Let's bring the morgues to life!
- In the same vein, Reuters released an AI-powered search of its entire archive.
- U.S. Census data is changing, and not for the better, from danah boyd.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, an independent content strategy consultant.
Affiliate referrals: Ghost publishing system
Cultural recommendations / personal social: Spotify | Instagram | Letterboxd | PI.FYI
Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.
Three songs that remind me of life after 9/11: "Argument" by Fugazi, "Biomusicology" by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and "The Sweat Descends" by Les Savy Fav.