Like a lot of baby boomers I struggle with technology. In my last real job I’d start whining about something that wouldn’t work. A 20-something co-worker would get up from his desk, grab my laptop, tap a couple of buttons, fix the problem and return to his cubicle. He would say very little, but the unspoken message was clear. How did this guy get this far in life? This was a question common among Madisonians for about eight years and one still frequently asked by Isthmus readers today.
So, it came as a surprise when I was asked to speak at something called the Madison Tech & Society Meetup. The group was started recently by two 20/30-somethings (everybody under 40 looks about the same age to me), Nick Lombardino and Ali Maresh. Yes, in fact, Nick’s family did start the iconic Madison Italian restaurant with the famous building-long sign on the city’s near west side. Ali is a Madison native who thrived in Washington, D.C., but decided she missed home and returned here to do communications for a state agency.
Ali read a column I had written — Yes! A young person read my column! And in the actual print newspaper — in July about declaring my independence from social media and was intrigued by the notion. She and Nick had been thinking about how all that screen time was impacting society, which is why they started the meetup.
“The goal of our group is to bring people together to discuss the ways technology is impacting society,” they wrote to me in their invitation. “During each meetup, we pick a particular topic to focus on and feature a guest speaker with expertise on the topic. For example previous topics have included parenting in the digital age and the importance of practicing mindfulness in the workplace.”
I was asked to talk about how technology was impacting journalism and politics. My conclusion: badly.
Realizing that young people just love it when previous generations describe how it was back then and how everything was better, I started by giving them a history lesson. I described how news once came out of big, expensive printing presses twice a day and from big, expensive television studios once a day; how the technology pretty much dictated that only rich people and big corporations could control the media; and how editors (who were almost exclusively middle-aged white guys) had a pretty uniform understanding of what news was and was not. You could get your news from NBC, CBS or ABC, or from the Milwaukee Sentinel or Milwaukee Journal (I grew up in Milwaukee, but this was true anywhere), but you would see pretty much the same stories presented in pretty much the same order and using the same sources.
But the upside of that narrowness was that there was a common narrative to American life. We might have had different perspectives on what was happening, but we were all pretty much aware of the same stories and there was some general agreement on what was important and what wasn’t. Today, we don’t just disagree about the meaning of the same set of facts; we live in different worlds of “facts,” some of which aren’t even true.
The other major thread that I highlighted for their edification (they were, of course, rapt by this point) was the obliteration of the news cycles and the rush to immediate judgment. A program that I’m sometimes unlucky enough to stumble on is Morning Joe on MSNBC. In that program you get a little bit of news and lots of immediate commentary all entwined so that it could be hard for the casual watcher to discern what are facts and what are opinions about facts. Moreover, those opinions are being formed in real time. People are literally pulling thoughts off the top of their heads as the news is being reported without taking any time at all to let a story develop or to just give things some thought. And Morning Joe is just a particularly egregious case of what’s going on all over the media, both left and right.
And, of course, politicians are just creatures of the larger culture. They adapt to how the news is presented. So, if we think our politicians are too quick to comment, too fast to go for the jugular, too tribal, well, they’re just figuring out how to survive and prosper in this environment. Most pols don’t lead; they surf.
But when I finally, mercifully ended my lecture about the good old days and we started discussing what to do about our current troubles, nobody, including me, had any broad answers. All of us could come up with ways to personally establish a little more sanity in our lives. Read books. Discipline our use of social media, texting and email. Sometimes just turn off the damn phone. Frequent websites that take a slower, more thoughtful approach. Read physical newspapers, like Isthmus!
But those are all things individuals can do. Nobody had a credible idea about what to do systemically. My friend Zach Blumenfeld, who developed a Madison startup called ThirdSpace, suggested that the best way to make big change was to prevent outlets like Facebook from using algorithms, which track our online habits and pitch products (and politics) to us in an ever-deepening echo chamber. As a result, our ideas about politics and culture never get challenged but rather confirmed over and over again until moderation and compromise become all but impossible.
But we all agreed that algorithms are not going to go away. It’s how social media outlets make their billions of dollars. Desperate to leave us with something hopeful, I suggested that American politics goes in cycles. We reacted against the nuanced, intellectual, liberal Obama with the blunt, anti-intellectual, conservative Trump. At some point we’ll tire of that and return to a leadership style that emphasizes civility and thoughtfulness.
On my walk home I convinced myself that I was right about that last point. Technology is agnostic. It just magnifies human nature. Right now it seems like it is working to magnify the worst parts of who we are, but it just as easily could be used to blast thoughtfulness, decency and kindness back into our lives. Maybe someday it will.
