"After a night's sleep the news is as
indispensable as the breakfast," Thoreau wrote sarcastically in 1854,
about the time people began to use the phrase "the news" to refer to the
bundle of information that's dumped on the public's doorstep on a daily
basis.
That ritual of daily news consumption was a "mass ceremony," as the
political scientist Benedict Anderson describes it, which shaped the
sense of community essential to national consciousness.
But "the news of the day" was never more than a convenient fiction, and
one that the all-news broadcasters and the Internet have made it
increasingly hard to sustain.
So, I wondered, what is "news" if it is not separate from the "now?"
And I realized with a start, it is gone but not gone - merely not
separate any more. The key news
has always been what is in front of us, what our conciousness filters
out of the torrent coming from our senses. We are designed to filter the
noise out of the signal and, once more, we must rely on our own
filtering and focusing of what comes from our now augmented senses. And,
I suspect, we need to find another convenient fiction to shape a
sense of community - physical and digital.
7:15:16 AM 
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