“[I]t was steam-power, not binary code, that birthed the modern news industry” writes Jeffrey Bilbro (11). The application of steam technology to the faculties of printed media transformed the news in the early 19th century. Prior to the 1830s “the modern relationship between the press and the urban populace had yet to emerge” David Henkin explains in his contribution to The City in American Literature and Culture (27). There were small press publications whose readership was relatively small, elite, literate, and whose lifestyles afforded the leisure for the focused attention demanded by pre-“news-revolution” writing.
“In 1833, however, a journeyman printer named Benjamin Day presented New Yorkers with a new product, promising on his masthead ‘to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY’ ” (Henkin, 28). Henkin notes the way in which the penny-press changed moreover the relationship of writer-reader, now readers read the apparent objectivity of the conglomerate paperfolk while the journalists “referred implicitly to a vast, anonymous urban populace” (ibid., 28).
The news emerged from the industrial revolution as a consumable product created by crowds for crowds. And while good work has been done and continues to be done by particular journalists, it is the immediately-gratifying, mobbishly-entertaining, and ephemeral nature of contemporary news that awoke the ire of Henry David Thoreau. Bilbro draws from Thoreau’s criticisms of the industrial news (both of which “came of age” in the 1830s) and offers a theological caution for modern news consumers, which I’ll summarize thus: if left unchecked and unevaluated, an unthinking consumption of “news” (be it from the Star Advertiser, or Fox, or Buzzfeed, or ViceNews) threatens to macadamize our attention —breaking it into rubble for the crushing press of various whims and curiosities.
It can induce “a vague, underlying sense of boredom and dis-ease, what [Thoreau] terms a mental ‘dyspepsia’’ (Bilbro, 12).
It can render “us vulnerable to the wiles of advertisers and politicians” (ibid.)
It can warp “our emotional sensibilities, directing them toward distant, spectacular events and making it more difficult for us to sympathize with and love our neighbors” (ibid.)
The problem here, is not knowing actual news of the world, nor is it a problem of engaging too much with the world around us. It is having our attention and our ability to respond to the things to which we attend shaped and furnished by the hyperreality of constant consumption that demands we leaven whatever actual news we perhaps ought to know with ever more tenuous and pseudo-real events or investigations (such as the recent “investigation” by Joel Burrows for ViceNews, I Timed How Long Office Furniture Stores Would Let Me Work at Their Desks).
The concept of spending a season away from the nightly news, or of getting-off social media for a time, seems preposterous: “What? How will I know what’s going-on in the world!?” But do you see what we have just confessed, implicitly, in our protestations? We have come to believe, with all of the sincerity of an addict, that we could not conceivably live connected to the world in any way other than via the curated content of the digital news industry. There is, contrary to the author of Hebrews, another mediator who has passed through the heavens to communicate Truth to us, and it is not the Son of Mary: it’s our newsfeed.
This, and not a sheer knowledge of current events, is what Bilbro and Thoreau have in mind in their concerns.
Thoreau, in particular, is severe in his comments: “If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire —thinner than the paper on which it is printed— then these things will fill the world for you” (Reform Papers, 156; as quoted in Bilbro, 15). You see, connection to “the real world” is not merely brokered by an uncritical consumption of news-media… news-media very quickly becomes the world it reports, and the very measure of our concept of reality.
I’ll state here, just to make it explicit, a clarifying remark: I am not opposed to engagement with reality, nor do I think Christians should “burry their heads in the sand” —to borrow the colloquialism— and stay out of civic, urban, or political life. Indeed, I believe quite the opposite. I believe that each Sunday the Lord “dismisses” and “distributes” his Church for the life of the world. Paradoxically, what Thoreau and Bilbro suggest is that it is precisely engagement with reality that uncritical news-media consumption delimits and disables.
Bilbro would have us “seek-out healthy communities with whom to read the news” (173). These communities would help us read the news in the light of our actual living community in the world (a world thicker than the “thin stratum” described by Thoreau) and to reflect critically within that community on how we ought to respond to the events of our day. If the promise of Benjamin Day’s paper was to offer to all of the strangers and crowds of New York the promise of a god-like knowledge of the life of their city, so they could somehow no longer feel as much like strangers in a crowd, then a proper relationship to the news should refuse that false babelic promise while at the same time achieving a sense of knowing-and-being-known” for the strangers in the urban crowd. Thus, Christians can offer a different mode of knowing and being known in the city: neighborliness. Both locally and trans-locally, good news-reading should make us good neighbors and help us attend not merely to “the Times” but to “the Eternities” (to riff on a phrase from Thoreau).