Francis Steen - MIT CMS Colloquium →
"The news takes the individual events that take place in the world and situates them in this ‘state spaces’ of what is valuable and what is possible. What I mean by this is that we have some idea of ‘preferred outcomes’ - where we’d like society to go, what outcomes I’d like for myself, what I’d like for my community and for the whole greater society.
Then we have a whole series of possible sets of events. Even what is possible is in a sense still socially contingent, in the sense that your own conception of what your society could produce is still an implicit frame. Clearly the real possibility space of human societies are vast. Within the space of the possible, each point in this possibility space represents one particular state of the world. From this, you can look at actions as trajectories within these spaces, trajectories in the sense that they move from one possible state of the world to another. Whenever you act, you change the world, you modify history.”
… “Question is - Why can’t the news just tell us what happened? The news does a lot more work than that, It assembles a narrative.
It’s through narratives that humans figure out how to intervene in the world and change the future. It’s through narratives that humans gain control and we expect television to give us those narratives. It’s how we are in a sense empowered to take power of our own destiny, of our own culture.”
… “What happens is that the focus of the news slowly moves away from presenting evidence, explaining what happened, and accounting for the evidence, to basically saying ‘what could we have done?’
Massive amounts of news coverage is about what never happened. It’s in the realm of the possible. Part of what I’m suggesting is that as a society, what we really care about is the possible, that’s more important that the fact and more fundamental than the fact.”