The case for context: my opening statement for SXSW
Longtime readers of this site probably know that I’ll be speaking on a panel at SXSW on Monday with NYU’s Jay Rosen, Apture’s Tristan Harris and paidContent’s Staci Kramer about the future of context. I trust that if you’ve been reading and you’ll be in Austin for SXSW, you’ll be in Hilton H on Monday morning at 9:30. This is a preview of my opening argument for the panel. If this seems like familiar territory for me, don’t worry, the panel is going to cover plenty of untrodden territory. And the session will be all the better if you share your thoughts and questions in the thread below. Also see Jay’s conversation-starter here.
If you’re like most people, you have a certain amount of ambient knowledge that health-care reform is happening. You pay attention to headlines, and you see a lot of stories about Nancy Pelosi saying this, or Mitch McConnell saying that. You catch a line or two about it in a Presidential address. You’ve watched some headlines about it in the evening news.
Chances are that most of the information you’ve encountered about this subject has been what I’d call episodic. Over time, you may have heard a lot about budget reconciliation, insurance premium hikes, the public option, the excise tax, the Wyden-Bennett bill, the Stupak amendment, and on and on and on. You know that Democrats are trying to do something to the health care system, but it’s either a government takeover or an insurance industry giveaway. Hard to tell.
This constant torrent of episodic information is how many of us encounter information about current events. This has been true for as long as any of us has been alive, but in the wake of the real-time Web, it’s become ever more constant and ever more torrential.
Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.
But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.
It turns out that in order for information about things like the public option and budget reconciliation to be useful to you, you need a certain amount of systemic knowledge to be able to parse it. You need an intellectual framework for understanding health care reform before the episodic headlines relating to health care reform make any sense.
It further turns out that this systemic knowledge is actually a whole lot easier to provide than the episodic stuff. At the pace of daily news, health care reform seems really, really complicated. But one of the most knowledgeable journalists reporting on the health-care process has already distilled almost every health care system in the world into four essential types. It would take maybe ten minutes to fill in the details on this framework, but once you get that knowledge, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand the system we have in the US, and the system that the Democrats are trying to turn ours into. From there, all those headlines about “bending the curve” actually start to make sense.
Right now, the most common way the news industry attempts to impart systemic knowledge is by wedging it into our episodic reports. We’ll give you tons of stories on Congresspeople sneezing something that sounds like “reconciliation” and every time, a little ways in, we’ll say something like, “Reconciliation is a procedural tactic originally designed to speed adoption of budget resolutions through Congress.”
This is completely bass-ackwards. Journalists spend a ton of time trying to acquire the systemic knowledge we need to report an issue, yet we dribble it out in stingy bits between lots and lots of worthless, episodic updates. We do this for several reasons – high among which is your continued willingness to read story after story and watch ad after ad to get updates we could sum up in a sentence – and also high among which is the fact that we used to deal exclusively in media that are pretty rigidly bounded by time. The only way we knew how to tell the story is in terms of “What happens next?” not in terms of “What’s happening.”
These terms I’ve been using – “intellectual framework,” “systemic information,” etc. – this is what I mean when I say “context.” I’ve pitched you on the consumer benefits of context, but information creators are also slowly beginning to come around to the long-term ROI of delivering context as well, for several reasons. For one thing, our information becomes much more valuable and much more desirable to you as your framework for understanding it becomes better. Jay Rosen has astutely noted the uptick in attention to financial crisis stories after This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money episode laid out the context of the crisis. For another thing, the success of Wikipedia and the enduring popularity of items like “The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Social Media” has taught us there’s a real market for context. There are also significant advertising benefits to having more sophisticated structures for information than “latest updates.” We could dwell on the “why” for a long time.
But I want to use our time at SXSW to explore a more forward-pointed question: How?
For the first time, we have a medium perfectly equipped to capture and deliver both episodic and systemic information. How will these two modes of information interact on the Web? What sort of design and storytelling structures must we invent to impart context? Fundamentally, in a medium that’s not constrained by time, what is the future of the Timeless Web?
Help make our panel better. What are your thoughts, and what are your questions?
Curation is the key.
People provide the episodic torrents of non-contextualized headlines and experts/ journalists provide the analysis. The experts choose the signal amid the noise, and after the crowd is exposed to that signal, the rest of the noise will make more sense.
The tools experts use to document and share what they curate is a whole other topic, but it won’t solely come in the form of blog posts. There needs to be a more complex, searchable, taggable, meta-data-filled system for organizing contextual data. I don’t know what that system looks like, but I do know it doesn’t exist yet.
Lauren Rabaino
10 Mar 10 at 8:50 pm
First time reader. Great article!
I’m struck by the thought that conference sessions themselves are episodic, especially at SXSW — that’s not meant as irony…more frustration at ones I can’t attend. Regardless, I can’t wait to hear (or read) more about the “How?”.
Speaking of context, you are too modest, “Written by Matt”!
Jay G
10 Mar 10 at 9:02 pm
Wish I could be there to see this panel.
One of the things I’m thinking about is that “context” can mean many different things, and different stories could require several different kinds of contexts. For instance, context could mean something like “historical background” — how did things/actors come to be this way through time. It could also mean “structure of systems,” whether formal or informal — how do things interconnect?
You could also say that part of the context of a story is explaining how that story came to become a story — who did the research, leaked the information, acted as a translator, etc.
It also could be linguistic context, and a lot of your examples here are really about explaining words and phrases. What do these words mean, or what have they been made to mean? One of my pet peeves lately with the coverage of the move to reconciliation for health care has been the attempt to re-label reconciliation “the nuclear option.” The phrase “nuclear option” means something very specific in recent politics — it was the idea, around 2005, that a new Senate could move that the rules of filibuster/cloture only applied to legislation, not to executive nominees. It was called “nuclear” because it threatened to change the rules about filibustering nominees forever — that’s what the whole “Gang of 14″ process was about.
Now we’ve got a phrase with a history that doesn’t just run counter to the attempted meaning, but actually to the whole narrative that attempt is trying to uphold — but as far as I can tell, nobody is trying to provide that very minimal piece of context.
Tim Carmody
10 Mar 10 at 9:40 pm
How. I’d say you need the combination of the Wiki and a Pivot. (http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration.html)
That way you can pivot between a detailed story, a timeline of facts as they were realized, and even merge stories together like a journalistic Venn diagram. The Pivot could Deep Zoom (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645050(VS.95).aspx) from a single story out to a broader mesh of interconnected and interrelated stories across the web, pivoting along the way between media types and even ideological differences based on algorithms that look at cross linking sources while comparing keywords and phrases from the paragraph it’s cross linked from.
Larry Larsen
10 Mar 10 at 11:35 pm
Well, while I’m sure that there are many opportunities on the web to go beyond context as we understand that from the point of view of printed publications (the web is timeless, as you say), at the end of the day, I don’t think it’s really that hard.
As Tim Carmody says, it’s about actors in a story, who they are and how they interrelate, it’s about how different articles addressing the same topic hang together and their defining events, et cetera. That means biographies on people and profiles on organizations, it means topic pages that amount to more than just links to the articles they contain, it means timelines that show pivotal points and shows which news articles talk about which part of that bigger story, it means maps of where these things are happening, it means an explanation of why this is important and to whom it is important. Hardly rocket science, just plain ol’ context as we’ve always understood it.
The problem isn’t that we need more innovation or that we need to invent cool techniques to bring context. Maybe we need that too, but the key problem is that we know how to provide the necessary context for news stories, yet no-one seems to really do it.
The ‘How?’ question needs to be ‘How can we change our workflows and attitude to provide more background for readers, how can we change the newsroom?’ Let’s first get those basics down.
Stijn Debrouwere
11 Mar 10 at 4:20 am
Thanks Matt -
Great opening statement.
I agree with you all that context needed and we really need to work on the “how”.
The context applications, including the exciting ones like Pivot noted by Larry and others to come, will need better raw material. Many on our team have become convinced that we must start with a new way to create content in the first instance, so that each element of information can “flow” into whatever context application is relevant to the user.
As I wrote in 2008 – “We have to start with the creation of the “elements” in the first instance. By starting with each source, quote, factual statement, picture, graphic, audio clip or video clip as an isolated element, or “tweet”, properly tagged with automatic tagging engines, those elements can be packaged or searched directly, allowing the most transparent view of local information.” http://chuckpeters.iowa.com/2008/12/information-in-the-first-instance/
New services like Pivot, or existing services like Zemanta, could do wonders if the elements were each heavily tagged in the first instance, and were able to flow to the application in which they were needed.
We cannot expect to fulfill every individual’s need for information in context by creating and packaging content in locked-down articles. The wikis and articles can provide entry points to the inquiry. From there, we should be able to range both wide and deep.
It seems many of the tools do exist, or will soon. All it takes is the will to create a new system.
Thanks for continuing this conversation.
Chuck
Chuck Peters
11 Mar 10 at 7:08 am
One thing I’d add to this is just how useful thinking about stories and issues this way can be to reporters.
Putting together all the systemic knowledge, building that framework for understanding, then writing it in a way that makes sense to someone outside the newsroom (or new to the beat) forces you to find all the gaps in your own knowledge.
Organizing that into a regular structure means reporters can much more easily share information and build on each other’s knowledge.
Chris Amico
11 Mar 10 at 11:10 am
That’s a crucial point, Chris. I’ve begun to believe the one of the major differences between a great beat reporter and a mediocre one is that the greats have all developed this systemic map of their beat, and they work constantly to refine it. They have a sense of a trajectory in their beat, they understand the flows of authority within it, and they always, always know where they need to do more reporting.
Matt
11 Mar 10 at 3:22 pm
Chris and Matt -
Yes, we need to create this virtuous cycle which strengthens individual users, communities and the story tellers, as the episodic stories are expanded, as I noted earlier, “in both directions – back toward the original elements, offering transparency, and forward toward a summary of local knowledge in a local wiki.”
Mariam Cook notes – “I think a major challenge with this is the competitive nature of journalism – which means reporters are more inclined towards holding onto their ‘golden rolodex’ than developing a wiki containing what they need to ‘break a story’ or put their name to an exclusive investigation.” http://mariamz.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/developing-participatory-news-2/
Do you think Mariam is raising a legitimate concern? Would journalists becoming their own brand help?
http://emediavitals.com/article/17/experimenting-new-journalism-model
Thanks,
Chuck
Chuck Peters
12 Mar 10 at 6:16 am
Matt,
The most interesting part about this post is that anyone would need to make a “case for context”. It should not be necessary, but you’re right, it is. These ideas are not new of course. It goes back as far as Aristotle, but was more recently advanced by Ayn Rand in the book on “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology”. Although I’m not a Randist, this book is excellent and right on your point. It should be required reading, especially for Journalists.
Obviously, the problem lies in a school system and a main stream media that are hopelessly biased towards an invalid and immoral intellectual framework. The school system first does everything it can to retard the development of critical thinking skills. The MSM does the same and then approaches every issue with a bias towards government and against human liberty.
With context and a valid intellectual framework, one would understand that “single payer” is only about the health care industry, like the civil war was just about the cotton and tobacco industries.
A good journalist would ponder if a “single payer” system is good for medical professionals, then it should be good for journalists as well. Maybe it should be illegal for anyone to provide or consume news that does not come from the “single payer”? A good journalist would point the reader to his own business and ask if he wants to work for the “single payer”, and if this is consistent with the ideals of America’s founding fathers.
Sam Adams
19 Apr 10 at 5:26 pm
[...] [...]
The Future of Social Media in Journalism
13 Apr 11 at 3:17 pm
[...] kan tas som utgangspunkt for en diskusjon om kontekstualisering av nyheter. Journalister er ekstremt fokusert på øyeblikkets nyhetsformidling, og glemmer at brukere og [...]
Straffeporto til nettmediene « Undercurrent
13 Apr 11 at 3:55 pm
[...] pages can be a really good idea, providing much needed context and background material for readers. But as Steve Yelvington has noted, topic pages aren’t [...]
Linking by the numbers: How news organizations are using links (or not) » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism
19 May 11 at 2:11 pm
[...] If the post is not for an aggregation-based service, it’s best to decide beforehand whether the story merits linking. A test of two New York Times stories (one with the inverted pyramid style and one with background information presented early, both versions having two sets of links for traditional related sites and explanatory text) showed that readers preferred stories that paired explanatory text with explanatory links and traditional article writing with traditional links. Moral of the story: Prepare to link a story the same way you would prepare to write one — think ahead and consider the story’s context. [...]
Hyperlinking for non-linear storytelling « seesaraedit
29 Feb 12 at 6:11 am