In a time where immediacy is demanded when it comes to social media, we undervalue waiting. Twice this week there were stories that demanded the wait, but we wouldn’t wait. Time lost that we can’t get back.
There was a period in the world where news was much more slow. It could take months, sometimes years, to get news and when that news was had, it was aged and even out of date. That doesn’t do well either.
News stories need time. I am not a journalist, at times in my life I was maybe a citizen-journalist of sorts, but I never thought of myself as a journalist and I don’t aspire to be one. This is not to say I don’t respect those who have chosen this path – I do, when they can balance waiting with immediacy. When a story isn’t ready, it is simply not ready, and when it’s late, it’s too damned late.
But Media is society’s mirror. Most people don’t realize it.
An example? The Titan. Early on, the US Navy had heard a possible implosion on their network (which isn’t really that secret) at around the time the Titan went missing, in the same area, and reported it to the relevant Coast Guard people involved in the search. This was not in the news.
Meanwhile, for some time, the media gets to inundate us with stuff we want to know about – which in a peculiar way seems to have not been as much about the fact that the submersible should have surfaced within 24 hours. That too was left out for a while. The information, like the Navy report, was there – but people get to look really busy, and the politics of it plays well.
We want to believe that they would look for us, don’t we? That even if there was the faintest chance, that someone would come looking. It’s a Hollywood story. As it ends up, it’s a Hollywood Story with half of a James Cameron ending. Everybody died, there wasn’t a woman who would become an old lady to tell a story to someone about the guy who couldn’t get next to her.
Immediacy with respect to the Titan would not have worked for the media or politicians, because most people wouldn’t watch a news story about recovering wreckage to study. It’s sad, and unfortunately it’s true. It is, however, what’s really happening at this point: figuring out why it failed. The side benefit is that someone will get blamed and everyone will get to feel good about wagging their fingers, while the majority of humans inhabiting the planet are on to the next story.
It’s like the whole Russian issue yesterday. A 24 hour uprising lead by the head of the Wagner group. I normally keep up to date with Ukraine, but I had some noise pollution that kept me up later than usual so by the time I found out it was well underway – but it wasn’t adding up. I didn’t write about it. I polled my source stuff. It still wasn’t adding up, and there was no clear direction. I told people to listen to the Benny Hill track while watching any news they got.
It’s really a good soundtrack when you’re getting ‘live updates’ on anything because what’s happening is that in the want to be first, stuff gets reported that may not be worth reporting. Much of it was.
Even the brokering of a truce by Belarus’s Lukashenko seems weird to me. Neither party involved really has listened much to Lukashenko, so I don’t see why they would now – now there is a story, something worth researching and investigating, but that’s where the story really is. Because without that solid piece to lock it all in, it’s all a bunch of floating pieces clinging together for dear life.
Sometimes it’s best to wait. Sometimes not.
When I write something, particularly on KnowProSE.com, it has to feel worth writing about. The Titan I wrote about a bit because we didn’t seem to be getting the whole story – and we weren’t. We probably still aren’t. That US Navy network is really good at what it does, as old as it is, and anyone who has read, “The Hunt for Red October” knows how awesome Jonesy the Sonar Tech was on a submarine. The movie lacked that depth.
That search was a ‘Hail Mary’ for the media. Everyone in the know knew with a high degree of certainty that if that submersible didn’t surface within 24 hours, that Navy sonar network was probably 99.9% correct. That was the story. It still is the story, now it’s about finding scapegoats while advancing knowledge on why that deep sea submersible (It had one job!) was not a deep sea submersible.
And the Russian ‘coup’? It was never a coup. It was a threatened coup. A well televised threatened coup. A too televised threatened coup. It bordered on theatrical, if it didn’t jump solidly on that part of the line occasionally. As someone who has gotten well educated on that part of the world through friends made since, I definitely want Ukraine’s victory. My spirits lifted a bit for Ukraine, that this would make the reclamation of territory extremely easy, but to me it also did not smell right.
And so, I didn’t write about it and was rewarded with not looking like a complete idiot after the fact. It still doesn’t make sense, that whole 24 hour thing.
The point is that when we write, we have to recognize the responsibility we have. Journalists are supposed to understand this. Social media stars generally don’t with a few exceptions.
Writing good stuff is a responsibility. Writing good true stuff on such occasions is also a responsibility, and making sure the stuff is true is not an easy task. Rewriting someone else’s facts is borderline, but sometimes good if you can make it more readable or otherwise add value.
But simply writing what everyone else is writing about during a real world event when you don’t do those things is just littering, really. We shouldn’t litter.
Sometimes we should wait. And sometimes we shouldn’t.
When I woke up, it had the feel of a Saturday.
Douglas Adams was on to something with 
It’s sensible to distrust systems that pretty consistently fail, and almost always these systems has something to do with government. Nobody, regardless of their political lean, goes out and blames the trees for bad weather. Nobody shakes their fist at a hurricane and says, “I didn’t vote for this!”.
Having lived here and there, and having visited here and there outside of the tourist traps -they are, after all, traps – I can say that the problem is global, and if there is a human somewhere that doesn’t have issues with the system of taxation, they are a distinct minority. We double down here, because how that money is spent is decided by people who win popularity contests. Politicians.