Fifty years on, an entire generation still remembers where it was when they first heard news of the Kennedy assassination. Broadcast television was in its infancy but when the public watched Walter Cronkite deliver news of the president’s death the country entered a new phase of the Information Age. The idea that a national audience could be an eyewitness to history was swiftly confirmed when the fatal shooting of the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was broadcast live to millions of Americans. A few days later the sight of the president’s young son saluting the casket at the funeral became yet another of the unforgettable televisual moments related to the terrible events in Dallas.
The national unity which followed the Kennedy assassination seemed to fulfil part of the dream which had resurfaced when television became a staple of American life. More than a century earlier Samuel Morse had described the telegraph wires that transmitted his new code as nerves that would “diffuse with the speed of thought, knowledge of all that is occurring throughout the land; making, in fact, one neighborhood of the whole country.” Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, demurred and feared that the rush to build tunnels under the Atlantic that would “bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new,” would overwhelm the public with trivia: “perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
In retrospect both Morse and Thoreau seem prescient. Technology now shuttles information around the world with near simultaneity and the idea of a global village no longer seems fanciful, but the costs of the new information systems have largely remained hidden. The cultural critic Neal Postman argued that the telegraph inaugurated an age of “large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence,” because it allowed news agencies to share information from remote places without asking why their readers might be interested in what was happening there. In the new dispensation it made sense to focus on what would later become the staples of “infotainment” (sports, show business and political intrigue) because this sort of news travelled well. Later developments further extended the distance between an audience and the news it consumed until the idea of context was almost completely irrelevant.
These changes were important to the political development of Caribbean, often in ways that we fail to remember. Derek Walcott recalls that the outbreak of the Great War was spread around the capital of St Lucia by a town crier who rang a bell in public spaces and shouted “Lacherre! Lacherre!” [la guerre, la guerre] before riding off on his bicycle to shout the news somewhere else. It is hard to believe that less than a century later it was possible to watch, from that same island, the September 2001 attacks on New York unfold on live television.
Today news is generated by tens of thousands of individuals ‒ via Twitter feeds and Facebook updates ‒ and the idea of live news is a commonplace. But it remains an open question whether the vast amount of information that flows through our browsers and smartphones is any more relevant. Thirty years ago Neal Postman asked his readers to consider how often information provided by their local radio, television station or morning newspaper provided them with insight into a problem they needed to solve, altered their plans for the rest of the day, or caused them to act differently. Apart from weather reports and stock market updates, very little news then or now would count as relevant.
Since Postman wrote about the disappearance of relevance there has been a significant levelling of information. Much of what we read today now lacks any context whatsoever. The same platforms that keep us informed about the war in Syria, or filibuster debate in the US Senate also broadcast up-to-the-minute gossip about celebrities like Kim Kardashian. In this perverse environment natural disasters that affect millions of lives in the developing world rarely displace the stars of celebrity culture for more than a few news cycles. Fifty years after one of the first ‘global’ news stories, perhaps it is worth asking ourselves how much of the vast quantities of information that we consume is truly relevant, or consequential, to our lives.
