When I was a kid, a phone ringing in the middle of the night meant only one thing: breaking news. As the curious, sometimes sleepless daughter of a newspaperman, I adored the nocturnal drama. Dad
would rise up, have the conversation -- and, more often than not, get dressed, jump in the car and drive into the city from our little home in Media, Pa. to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
newsroom.
It was exhilarating to feel on the inside of the news, just one step ahead of everybody else, if only by association to my dad the editor. Whether it was a gangland murder,
a political scandal or labor clash -- the midnight call sparked action. It felt linear in those days: the call, the conversation, the drive, the going to press, then the thud on the doorstep
next day and the community buzz in the days that followed.
Later this would become even more personal. In high school, I was early to hear about a local scandal involving a very
important authority figure in my life. Dad informed me over breakfast of devastating news that would break later that day and immediately change the lives of many of my friends. Even later, I jumped
at the chance to be part of the midnight ride the night of the attempted Gorbachev coup, joining my dad in the newsroom as the news package was built for release. But no matter what, it always started
with
one phone call.
The Big Black Phone as RelicFlash-forward to the advances in telecommunications and mobile, sweeping alterations to the news business,
the onset of the blogosphere, the diversification of content vehicles and distribution, the tentacles of social media and micro-blogging. Now, no word is encompassing enough to describe the scope of
change within the media environment -- and to describe how news breaks and travels today.
I find examples of this flow change all the time now. I recall being out at my parents' lake
house one random summer day. Glancing down at my BlackBerry, I noted, "Oh, my god. Dad, Tim Russert just died." Thanks to
New York Times alerts, Twitter activity cloaking any given
week, and RSS, this was not an isolated instance. Many times, I've blurted out some information delivered via these new means at odd times of the day. And, we see how notification transmits for
journalists today: in a way much less linear, more dynamic, more wired, more pocket- or desktop-level. To perhaps oversimplify, the role of the black phone has forever changed.
Media as Drama QueenOn a plane ride west, I am thinking about this transformation as I dig into the
Columbia Journalism Review's November issue: "The
Reconstruction of American Journalism." In a piece titled "Mourning Becomes Electric," Michael Schudson and Julia Sonnevend address research on the media treatment of mourning
rituals. This research, done by Mervi Pantti and Johanna Sumiala, focuses on the change in the nature of media activity around mourning today, with the lifting of technological limitations.
Considering this research, Schudson and Sonnevend express their own point of view: "Fragmented. Few words are used more often to describe the media environment today. People disappear
into their iPods, iPhones, BlackBerrys, Kindles, and laptops. They tweet, blog, Facebook, podcast and wend their way through their favorite cultural political sites. In short, they manufacture their
own media bubbles and seem to live in separate universes. Nonetheless, some iconic events win the attention of tens of millions of us. These events can be about celebration, trauma, or remembrance;
joyful or tragic, they bring us together - at least for a few hours or a few days."
The authors point to media's role in transporting mourning to almost theatrical levels,
providing several iconic examples:
Michael Jackson's memorial service, drawing 31 million U.S. viewers and one billion worldwide; a 19% spike in overall Global Web traffic;
9.7 million live video streams on CNN alone; onslaughts of blogosphere commentary.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy's body traveling 70 miles from the Kennedy Compound to the John F.
Kennedy Library in Boston for the live and virtual paying of respects; the somewhat nationally unifying public mourning event of the broadcast funeral mass itself.
Walter
Cronkite's death noted as "an occasion to memorialize the era of television as a national hearth in the new age of fragmentation, but... also testimony to the endurance of
collective ritual in the age of micro-hearths," evoking "collective remembrance of his iconic reporting" of major world-changing events.
According to the article's
authors, the researchers "emphasize that media-tized religious and nonreligious mourning rituals still have important cohesive roles for societies. Neither television nor God seem to have passed
away in the Twitter era. Today's media environment, fragmented as it is, remains a source of community, national, and even global solidarity."
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The Persistence of
Congregation
That I am reading this article on this particular journey seems a vivid coincidence. I am traveling to L.A. for the memorial of my old high school swim team buddy, who
recently passed away. As the news of his death hit, phones rang, emails flew, Facebook updates and texts gradually regathered the old school brood. It was obvious things had changed in the way we now,
so swiftly, communicated with and dealt with each other.
Many of my friends had originally guffawed at these communications practices; others were ensconced and swift to connect and
transmit. But, with a readiness that perhaps could not exist in prior times, from points far and wide, we are ALL showing up in L.A., ASAP. Sped along by connectivity, perhaps fueled by the poignance
of grief, congregation persists.
In what we most days agree is a profoundly intricate communication sphere -- fragmented or converged, depending on whom you are talking to -- we might see a
downside to all this connectivity and conveyance. People gripe about sterile vehicles, the loss of poetry, the loss of authenticity. They pine for the big black phone.
But, on any given
day, we also can see what this trend enables, even just taking the relationship between media and mourning as a useful example. In a newly connective world, the timelessness of our urge for connection
and congregation is sweet, and obvious.